Creating Custom Balloons in Mechanical Desktop 4 & 5

1.    Create a circle in standard AutoCAD showing the actual balloon circle size.  Place the circle center at the origin (0,0)

2.    Using ATTDEF, create a text attribute with a tag that matches the BOM Field to be displayed in the balloon. For a standard balloon, the tag would be ITEM. Do not  place anything in the Prompt or Value areas of the Dialog. 

Set the text height and style to the actual text height desired. Under Justification, select Center to justify the ITEM number to the center of the balloon. Set the Height of the text in actual plotted units.

Pick a point below the circle center to place your attribute. After picking OK to accept, the text attribute may be moved using the standard AutoCAD MOVE command.

3.    Save the drawing. This is the custom block that you will use in the following steps. Download the 0.375 Example Block 375block.zip

 


 

4.    Open your standard drawing template used to create MDT drawings. 

5.    INSERT the above created file into the drawing. Erase the inserted block. The block record will remain in this template as an unused block.

6.    Save the drawing template file. 

 

7.    While in the template drawing, select Edit BOM Database.
8.    Select Standard Properties so that you may customize the symbol properties to use the custom balloon block.
9.    Select the Modify - Balloon pulldown to enter the Balloon 
Properties Dialog Box.
10.    Select Use Custom Block. The desired block name should be listed on the pulldown list. Note that within the template drawing, you may insert as many different balloon blocks as desired into your template drawing.

11.   Select Leader to extents of user block in order to have the leader line stop at the circle.

The Arrow  type may be selected at this time.

Pick Apply and then OK. 

12.   Multiple symbol standards with additional balloon styles may be created by entering AMSYMSTD and copying an existing standard, then repeating steps 10 & 11 for each standard. 

13.   For additional templates, repeat steps 4-12 for each template file.

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Last Edited: 3/12/2001