After last week’s post on background masks for dimension objects, I poked around through my archives and realized I’ve never posted on regular text masks. I know I put it in a demo video, but I guess it never got its own post. Let’s fix that. When you’re creating or editing multiline text, there’s a button the Formatting panel called Background Mask. Click on it, and you’ll get a dialog box where you can set the offset factor and the fill color. The offset factor, how far the mask extends beyond the text, is relative to the text height. A factor of 1 keeps the mask the same size as the text. A factor of 1.5 provides a border equal to half the text height all the way around. The maximum factor for the mask is 5.0. For the fill color, you can either pick a standard color, or use the background color of the drawing, which basically means it’ll plot clear. New in 2012, the values you choose when creating a mask for a *new* text object will be remembered for the next time you want to apply a mask. (Previously, they defaulted to 1.5 and red every time.) The reason this only works for new text objects is that background masks are a property of the text. See?   So you have to actively set the variables for a new object before they’ll persist.  

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