With our Real Leader (RL) command, you can now type leader text right into your drawing onscreen! No need to watch a "bounding box" and try and guess what the text string will look like. It's intended as a direct replacement for the Leader command --you might want to assign the 2L shortcut LE to our tool.

It works almost exactly like LE: type the command, place the point for your arrow, and draw one or more lines, then type Pen Up (PU) to begin the text. But at this point, as you type, text appears onscreen as well as in the speedbar at top of screen. Cool.

You can also edit text onscreen, by selecting an already placed leader and typing RL. A dialog box (shown above) will appear, with all text highlighted. You can edit in the dialog, or you can edit directly onscreen. Note the vertical cursor in the picture --it's at the end of the string both in the dialog and onscreen (and is a blinking cursor onscreen so it's easy to see).

The reason we provide both is that when you edit onscreen you must use the arrow (direction) keys to navigate the text string (the Home and End keys also work). For many folks that's fine. In the dialog, you can use Windows conventions --for example you can use the mouse to highlight a whole string of words, and Cut, Copy and Paste them. You have a choice to work either way.

Our dialog is much smaller than the Leader Edit dialog in Visual CADD, so that more of your drawing is visible while editing. More importantly, the VCADD Leader Edit dialog defaults to the Font box --so you either have to mouse click to get focus to editing text, or use the TAB key 16 times (!!??). Our dialog is (obviously) meant only to edit leader text, but the good news is that, as shown in the illustration above, you can get right to it.

And if you prefer to only edit text onscreen, the dialog can be dragged off to the side or onto the status bar so that only a small portion of it is left showing in the drawing --you can retrieve it if needed, but otherwise it is out of your way. The dialog will "remember" it's location the next time you edit with RL.

Real Leader supports Single Unit Fractions --in Visual CADD they only work with dimensions and not with the leader or text tools.