If you find yourself clicking the “Insert field…” button in Sketch Text several dozen times a day, you may be unaware of a convenient shortcut.
Let’s say, for example, you have several anchors and you want to display the bond length, spacing, resistance and capacity for each. That’s four visits to the “Insert field” dialog box for each anchor. Carpal tunnel problems are not far behind.
To simplify the task, just use Insert field to insert the four fields for one of the anchors.
Then select everything in the box (Ctrl-A), copy it to the clipboard (Ctrl-C), and paste it back in again (Ctrl-V).
Now you need to edit the second group. See where it says “Reinforcements[1]“? You need to change that “1″ to a “2″. Instead of clicking on it (which just puts you back in the Insert field box), hold down the Ctrl key while you click. That will position your cursor where you click, so you can now edit the text. (Or you can use the arrow keys to move your cursor into the field name.)
Do the same for any additional anchors, and click on your drawing to position the text just as you normally would.
[Note: While I was trying this out for this blog, I noticed the fields did not always show up as blue underlined text. Normally that would indicate they are not valid fields, but in this case it appears to be a bug. When you insert the text on your drawing, all the fields are interpreted correctly. There's just something strange going on in the edit box itself. Guess I'd better get back to programming!]
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