Rich Text in ArchiCAD 9

ONE of the great improvements to AC9 is the rich text in the working environment. On the principle that anything that appears in the floor plan must also work in GDL, there is a way to author Rich Text in GDL – but it’s very hard work! It is not simply a matter of using something easy like BB-Code.

BB-Code is easier
When you have tried Rich text in GDL you will wish it was. BB-Code is used in bulletin board systems like ArchiCAD talk as an easy to learn and simple method of formatting text – reminds me of word processing in the early 1980’s, but it’s applied to HTML style text.

For example, ‘The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog’ could be written as ‘The [B]quick brown fox[/B] [color=red]jumped[/color] over the [I]lazy dog[/I]’. This would give us the ‘fox’ in bold and the ‘dog’ in italic and ‘jumped’ in red and the rest of the sentence in default pen colour. It’s very simple – square brackets with a code starts an action, and square brackets slash with the same code ends it.

There are masses of tutorials on BB-Code on the internet – it can even include pictures and active URLs. You can change lettering size and colour and style. We should all put pressure on GS to retain the new system (for compatibility) but to make another available for bears of little brain like us to use, using a version of BB-Code.

Rich Text hierarchy
Rich Text in GDL operates a bit more like Solid modelling. You have to build up definitions of styles, assemble paragraphs and text blocks, and then use the RICHTEXT command to finally place the result (a bit like PLACEGROUP). There is a systematic hierarchical sequence to get it right. Hardened GDL writers will like it because of the vastly improved appearance in self labelling and dimensioning objects, but normal GDL users will be content to get by in the way we have for the last few versions of GDL, changing the pen colours perhaps. For investment objects (where your time is rewarded in the number of times you will use the object), it is well worth learning how to do this. Word wrap is dynamic, so if you have graphical hotspots to resize text width, you will get a very powerful looking result.

Try some Rich Text
The best way to understand for yourself the way RICHTEXT and RICHTEXT2 work in GDL is to create a sample of rich text in ArchiCAD and drag it from the floor plan into GDL 2D Script and see what it makes as an autoscript. Once you have mastered the 2D, it’s very easy to adapt the result to make it into 3D text. As usual, the autoscript gives one very prescriptive numbers for everything (pens, font sizes, indents, letter spacing etc) but smart parametric routines in your script can make it perform parametrically.

Download pdf Rich Text in ArchiCAD 9