0 RTF in ArchiCAD 9

One of the great improvements to Rest is the rich text in the working environment. On the principle that everything that appears in the plan must also work in GDL, is there a way to author Rich Text in GDL – but it is very hard work! Is not simply a matter of using something as simple as BB code.

BB Code is easier
When you've tried RTF in GDL wishes it was. BB Code is used in bulletin board systems like ArchiCAD speaks as an easy to learn and simple text formatting method – reminds me of word processing in the early 1980s, but it is applied to the text of HTML style.

For example, "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog ' may be written as ' [B] Quick Brown Fox [/B] [color = red] Quick [/color] [I] [/I] lazy dog '. This would give us the ' fox ' in bold and italicized ' dog ' and ' jumped ' in red and the rest of the sentence in absentia pen color. It is very simple – with a square begins an action code, and ends with the same square bar code.

There are masses of tutorial on BB-Code on the internet – you can even include images and URLs. You can change the size and color and lettering style. We should all put pressure on GS to keep the new system (for backward compatibility) but to make another available for small brain bears like us to use, using a version of BB code.

Hierarchy of Rich Text
Rich Text in GDL works a bit like solid modeling. You must build the styles definitions, assemble paragraphs and blocks of text and then use the RICHTEXT finally enter the result (a bit like PLACEGROUP). There is a systematic hierarchical sequence to get it right. Writers GDL hardened like due to the vastly improved appearance in self labeling and dimensioning objects, but normal users will be happy to get away with GDLS in the way we have for the last few versions of GDL, changing colors, maybe. Investment objects (where time is rewarded in terms of the number of times that you will use the object), it's worth learning how to do this. Word wrap is dynamic, so if you have to resize the hotspot chart text width, you'll get a result looks very powerful.

Try some Rich Text
The best way to find out for yourself how RICHTEXT and RICHTEXT2 work in GDL is to create a rich text sample in ArchiCAD and drag it from 2D floorplan GDL Scripts and see what it does as an autoscript. Once learned, 2D is very easy to adapt the result to become 3D text. As usual, the autoscript gives a very prescriptive for all numbers (pens, font sizes, indents, spacing, letter etc.) but intelligent parametric routine in your script can run Parametrically.

Download pdf Rich Text in ArchiCAD 9

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