Inventor Drawing Leader Tips

by David Gate

Please find below a few simple tips for changing your text or balloon leaders in Inventor Drawings. In the past when I have been detailing drawings and I have be unable to get the leader perfect I would often end up deleting and retrying the placement.

If I had known the below tips it could have saved me abit of time and frustration. The first one is adding in vertex bends into your leader.

During initial placement you can simply click extra times to create vertexes. The below image shows you the left clicks in order and placement to create a bent leader.

If you want to add these after initial placement then you can. Right click anywhere on the leader.

Pick the “Add Vertex / Leader” option.

Now hover over the current leader. You will notice your mouse pointer changes to a few horizontal lines. This indicates you are going to add a vertex. Left click to create it.

You now have an extra vertex to move around.

But want if you want to remove a vertex. There is no right click option for this. Now if you have multiple vertexes then you can drag the vertex you want to delete onto one of its connected vertexes. But if you have only one vertex and you want to remove it then you need to drag that vertex onto the starting vertex (the tip of the arrow head, in the below picture). When you attempt this the final leader vertex must end up on the arrow tip vertex. If you don’t quite get it lined up (happens if you are too zoomed out) then the vertex will still exist and you will see 3 green vertex points instead of the normal 2. Check out my video to help with this as I show all that is mentioned.

All the above techniques work for anything with a leader attached. For text and other annotation symbol leaders you can use the “Add Vertex / Leader” option to add extra leader arrows, instead of clicking on the current leader click a new drawing item.

Look out for your mouse pointer glyph change to the below.

Then pick the vertex that you want your new extra leader to join to the old leader.

To help you out I have recorded a very quick video of the above processes. That should hopefully make it easier to follow and understand. See the 2 min video below