This was another lengthy, joint effort between me and my colleague Tony Isenhoff that generated considerable interest at AU 2006. This may be better located in the Families section. It was a judgment call - the moderators may prefer to move this thread.
It is not perfect and does not do everything we would prefer but I will offer that our users like this much better than using linetypes in AutoCAD. This may be complicated for new users but you could always forward this to your reseller technical support person and ask for help.
Attached is a PDF with an image of the library we have made, a ZIP file containing an example project you may use to deconstruct how we made it work, and a PDF with a live demonstration. Hopefully, this will get you started and you can avoid spending the many hours it took us to make it work.
A Few Extra Tips
- Our families are only successful for 1/16" and 1:20 plans. This is all we needed. If you do life safety drawings at a larger scale and don't like the text spacing, you may want duplicate families.
- Check the End Offset parameter to see how to avoid text on text in corners.
- Visibility parameters are your friends.
We could probably write a 50 page tutorial on this but time, as always, is the enemy. My suggestion is to keep requesting a better OOTB solution from Autodesk.
Good luck.
P. S. I'll buy dinner at AU next year if anyone has the time to explore a method for doing this with curved walls. We tabled that for awhile hoping all our designers will develop boxes. International Style, anyone?