How do you center a text feature in Pro/Engineer?

	Figure 1.  Start of Sketch

I am not sure there is a direct way of doing such a thing.  However, there is a pretty simple work-around.  It is not exact, but close enough for most applications.

Start by Sketching a Centerline at the position the text should be centered about.

Next Sketch a line that is Symmetric about the centerline (as shown in Figure 1).  (Note:  The little white arrows indicating the Symmetry constraint.  A Mid Point can also work.)

Figure 2.  Edit Menu

Next, use Toggle Construction to change the line to a non-geometry entity.   For those not familiar with this function, Pro/E 2001 and up have a Toggle Construction function in Sketcher that allows you to change an entity from geometry to non-geometry while maintaining size and position in the sketch.  -- Like the Construction Circles of older Pro/E versions. The menu pick is under the drop-down Edit menu as shown here in Figure 2, or using the right mouse button menu (with the right sequence).  Read more about it in Help.

Finally, create the desired text using the end of the line as the starting point and adjust dimensions so the line is the same length as the text.  See Figure 3. Since you cannot directly control text length, this is an iterative, by eye process.  For convenience, I place the length dimension for the line above the text so the dimension leaders extend past the text.  As shown here, when block style lettering is used it is easy to eye-ball the length of the line to be the same as the text -- effectively centering the text. The technique is essentially the same for Wildfire products as well.  See Figure 4.   So, PTC, what do you say?  How about adding text justification to the list of enhancements?   See you next Month !!

Figure 3.  Centered Text   Figure 4.  Wildfire 2.0

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