Learn/Drafting/Dimensions, Text & Annotation
Text & Fonts
At a glance
- Any TTF or OTF font installed on your system
- Spline mode: exact Bezier curves — zero approximation error
- Polyline mode: adaptively tessellated with configurable chord tolerance
- Output committed as a named group — move, scale, and rotate as one unit
The Text tool lives in the Sketch toolbar's Draw group. Type a string, pick a font, and a blue
preview follows your cursor — click to set the origin (or type exact X/Y coordinates) and hit
Finish. Height is measured to the cap height, so a height of 1.0 means one-inch-tall
capitals regardless of the font.
Any font on your system
JetCad3 enumerates every font installed on your machine — TTF and OTF, every family and style — and parses the actual outline data from the font file, not a rasterized stand-in. The ↑/↓ arrow keys cycle font families with the preview updating live, so you can flip through the whole list without touching the dropdown. Your last-used font, text, height, and output mode are all remembered for next time.
Four output modes
- Spline — every Bezier segment of each glyph becomes an exact B-spline. Zero approximation error; this is the default.
- Polyline (arc-fitted) — glyphs are tessellated, then refit to straight lines plus true circular arcs, so curves stay arcs instead of hundreds of tiny line segments.
- Polyline (line segments) — straight chords only, spaced to your tolerance.
- Lines, Arcs & Circles — arc-fitted, then exploded into individual line and arc entities.
The non-spline modes expose a Tolerance field (default 0.0001) that caps the maximum
deviation from the true glyph outline.
One group per string
Committed text lands as a single group: click any letter and the whole string selects, so you can move, scale, or rotate it as one unit with Manipulate. The group also stores each character's anchor point — that metadata is what lets Text on Arc curve the string later without touching the glyph outlines.