What I want to do is change the shape of the shape text box. From the suer guid you can move the associate text box but I need the text box to change size to fit the shape. I would like the text itself to wrap to a new line once it hits the set size of the text box.
For example, I have Actor shapes form the UML stencil/template. I have created a generalization and set the name and description in the properties. However, the text just keeps getting longer and there is no limit to the size (length). This seems to be a new problem with VisioProf 2003. Because in Visio Professional 2000 I was able to manipulate the shape’s text box size just by double clicking on the shape and pulling on the text box handles.
Thanks.

Regards,
Felicia

Your formula results in User.AntiScale in both the nominator and denominator, so they would cancel out.

Generally, font-resizing compares the current height of the shape to the original, then multiplies that by the original font size. In scaled drawings, though you have to watch out, because font sizes are not scaled, but height is (of course).

Technically, there should probably be two anti scales: one for the original page in which the master was created, one for the target page. I think that might be what your formula was attempting.

User.SomeFontSize = 12 pt * User.AntiScale * Height/User.Antiscale*0.375 in ?

if not could you clarify?

Thanks
-Allen

You are right, this probably should be an option, but I think in many, many, many Visio cases, you don’t want this to happen. Shapes act more as “paragraph boundaries”.

Also, should the text scale only with the height of the shape, or with the width as well? What if the text is rotated at 90 degrees to the shape? It gets tricky very quickly.

That said, it is the 21st century, and we should probably stop resorting to the ridiculous ShapeSheet sorcery explained in this article.

Thanks for the useful tips. This more of a question/suggestion for the guys at Microsoft: Why isn’t there an option (for example, using a check box) to “Scale text with objects”? Maybe we’ll have to wait for “Visio 2012″!

Look under File > Shapes > Visio Extras > Annotations.

There are some Scale shapes that do this for you.

You can kind of do it using the ShapeSheet’s SETF(GETREF(cellname), “someformula”) functionality. But you’re really causing loops to happen when you do this, and it ends up being…kind of icky–you have the feeling that it won’t work properly every time. And it isn’t easy to get working in the first place (or explain!)

The best method I’ve come up with is to have a hidden text box somewhere that acts as a “normalized measure”. The hidden text box contains the same text as the displayed text, but never changes font size. Therefore you can get a relative measure as to how much text there really is, and make decisions as to how much font-reduction needs to take place.

It’s more than I can really cover here, though. So good luck messing around, or perhaps there will be an article in the future, or a utility.

- Chris

How do I apply the “AntiScale” to the formula for shapes created in with a page scale other than 1:1? Where do I find the “AntiScale0″ in the shapesheet?

Thanks,
Graham

e.g. If I have a rectangle shape that is 15×10, and I put STATE_VAR1 in the text box, the text will line wrap. However, resizing the text to always allow it to fit on 1 line would be nice. I haven’t found any strlen type functions that I could use to calculate a new font size/scale.

Thanks