Inventor^® Training

Fully Constraining Text with Autodesk Inventor

By David Melvin, PE, TEDCF Publishing

You’ve added text to your sketch and you want to fully constrain it but you can’t figure out why there is still 1 dimension needed. You might even find that there are 3 dimensions needed. This tip shows you all the requirements to fully constrain text.

When you insert text into a sketch it needs 5 dimensions to fully constrain it. 2 of the dimensions are positional dimensions that locate the text box relative to other geometry. The height and width of the text box are 2 more dimensions, and the last dimension controls the angular orientation of the text.

The nodes on the corners of the text box can be used to control the location on the sketch. In this example I’ve constrained the node on the upper left corner of the text box to the projected node on the origin of the sketch using the Coincident constraint. As you can see, adding this constraint removes 2 dimension requirements.

Adding dimensions for the height and width reduces the number of dimensions required to fully constrain the text to 1.

A freedom of movement that most people miss is the angular orientation of the text. In this example I’ve added a 45-degree dimension, but you can add a horizontal or vertical constraint to the lines on the text box to fully constrain the text.

Why is this important?
Fully constraining you sketches is one of the fundamental tasks you should do with every sketch you draw. This gives you control over the geometry in your sketches. When you don’t fully constrain the geometry it can change without your knowledge. This can compromise the integrity of your models.