Detail Callouts Suddenly Look Different

Issue

You're placing Detail Callouts or Detail Placeholder Callouts in a drawing or detail, and you're noticing that they look different from before. Examples include:

• The text color is different or not respecting your previous office CTB or STB customizations.
• The main circle tag is no longer customized.
• The text size is different
• The text alignment no longer flips.

Cause

We updated to a new callout style in August 2025 for better functionality. You're seeing our updated callouts, likely in a plan where you previously used our old callout style.

The text color was previously created on the fly using a layer in the General Preferences layer list. Because it's now a block, it needs to use block layers.

The circle tag is now a different block name inside this new dynamic block.

The text size is static within the block, and the whole dynamic block, including tag and text, is now all scaled together to the plot scale currently set in your drawing or detail.

For the text alignment when flipping, the one limitation we were not able to overcome in this amazing feat of dynamic block engineering was getting the text to flip alignments. Because the text is now an attribute, AutoCAD does not allow us to use the same attribute twice in a single dynamic block, so visibility states were off the table for the text.

Solution

If you want to use our legacy callout style to match an existing project, or you're having issues with the new callout style for any reason, set the USERI1 system variable to a value of 12345 and you can continue using the old legacy callout styles.

Type USERI1 in the Command line and press Enter. When prompted to enter a value, type 12345 and press Enter again.

Changing the text color

If you feel the need to change the text color in your detail callouts, discuss this change with your office CAD manager and Land F/X standards manager before completing the following steps. Changes to Preference Sets apply office wide to all projects using the affected Preference Set.

1. Open the General Preferences screen.

 

Click Block Layers.

2. In the Block Layer Colors dialog box, select the number 7 row and click Edit.

3. In the Edit Block Layer Color dialog box, click the color sample square next to the number 7 under Change to:.

4. Click to select Color 1 (red), then click OK.

5. Back in the Edit Block Layer dialog box, click OK.

Do not change the layer colors of the current file. Doing so would assign color 1 to any layer currently set to color 7 – not just Land F/X block layers.

6. Delete the detail callouts, and use the PURGE command to purge the layers from the drawing.

7. Place the detail callout again. It should define the text layer as red.