Working with Text: Part 3
Spirit Academy’s Lady Warriors enter the California State tournament with an undefeated record of 17-0 in the regular season. A team invited from neighboring Arizona will be their first contest in a seeding game. The seeding game will determine how the teams stack up in the grid going into the tournament. The visiting Arizona team has no game history with the California teams in the tournament, and so there is no frame of reference for how they match up. After they play us the tournament committee will size them up and output the final brackets.
Just like the visiting Arizona team, there is no frame of reference for how CAD text should be displayed in the map-centric scale-dependent environment for which ArcGIS annotation was developed. CAD text traditionally has one size defined in drawing units. Annotation on the other hand has a scale dependent size defined usually in POINTS.
In order to size up the CAD text for display in ArcGIS as geodatabase annotation you need to supply reference scale and a size for that scale. The Import CAD annotation tools prompts for these two values. I have created a sample tool available on ESRI's ArcScripts.ESRI.com that helps you understand and calculate the appropriate values to enter into the Import CAD Annotation tool. You might also benefit from a more technical description found in the online help.