Text block stops at 4' 1" wide

[Jennifer]

I am seeing odd behavior by text for all different shapes.

I have a Visio document containing sketches of a cartoon train. There are pages for each car and one for the whole train. The whole train with all cars connected is about 5 feet long. I have it on a page set to 5' x 6'. Other pages have other dimensions.

On this one page with the very large dimensions, text that is attached to either a text shape or a rectangle shape will format normally until the shape width exceeds 4' 1". After that, the text will not flow into the area to the right of the 4' 1" mark. The left 4' 1" behaves as if that's the size of the shape. If I make the shape less than 4' 1" wide, the text will reformat properly.

It doesn't matter what the alignment is (left, right, center) or the point size (16 to 96).

I checked the margins in the Text Block tab. They were all "4 pts". Setting them all to 0 make little difference.

Can anyone suggest why this is happening?

[wapperdude]

I don't know if there's a physical limit or not, but, why not set the page scale factor to something like 1 inch = 5 feet or whatever?  There's no reason to set the page to be a literal 5' by 6'.  That should alleviate your text issue.

Wapperdude

[Jennifer]

The reason I set it to the actual physical dimensions is so I could put dimension on the sketches to get accurate measurements.

I haven't played around with scale factors, but I imagine I would screw it up.

[wapperdude]

Actually, it's pretty straight foward.  Take a simple example, 1" = 1' scaling. 

I'm going to assume you've never done this.  So, with a page being displayed, draw a 6" square.  Visio defaults to 1:1.  Now, go to File > Page setup.  Select the Drawing Scale tab.  Choose Pre-defined scale.  Keep Architectural.  Hit the pop down list arrow, and choose 1" = 1' 0".  You may have to scroll to find the entry.  Select OK.

Now, your square will look smaller, but, it's still 6".  That's the nice thing.  Your drawing dimensions remain intact, they just fit on regular sized paper.  If you have dimension shapes, they will still report correctly.

That's all there's to it.  You can play with other scale factors, or define your own with Custom scale. 

It's a lot better than trying to find a very expensive printer that will produce a 5' x  6' output!   

Wapperdude

[Jennifer]

OK, I'll try it. But I'd still like to know why Visio won't handle perfecftly good text properly.