Text entities not there.....

[Coolmo]

This seemed more like an AutoCAD general question instead of an LDD question soooo.....

I have text on the screen (cut/fill tics from an earthwork) that shows up fine but you can't touch them, move them, highlight them or anything. You can change the color of the layer they're on and their appearance changes but you still can't touch them. Now here's the weird thing. When you regen the drawing they go away all together and never come back until you open the drawing up again. Then they appear until you regen again. Does anyone know what's going on here?

Oh yeah, I'm running LDD 2002

[mjfarrell]

Look at this Link: http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/item?siteID=123112&id=2888103&linkID=2475507

I suspect that you are seeing ghosts.
As in they were in the drawing at some point
and are now gone, what is the INDEXCTL variable
set at? I suggest 3, and verify the condition of your
grid tick layer, is it frozen, off, same for defpoints
as many objects in land are linked to it. And verify
that it isn't that the surface that they were ticking off
hasn't been deleted, it should be listed in your Terrain
Model Explore, under volume surfaces.
If the drawing isn't huge zip it up and send it to me
and I will perform an Excorcism on it.

[Coolmo]

I've set aside a drawing called ghosttext1 but I have no idea how to email it to you. Where do you attach it?

[BrenBren]

When you reply to a post, look under the box you are typing in, you will see a button that says "go advanced", click on this and you will find the options for attachments, amongst other things

[Coolmo]

Thanks. here's the file. see what you can do with it.

[mjfarrell]

I have a clue, but no real solution
Send me your CTB and I'll know better.
Your indexCTL is set to 0
The view has been left in some PERSPECTIVE mode
prior to performing your regen, try to use quick select
from Object Propertie window and you will see the error.
I'm not sure only it seems that this drawin might have had
a UCS set when the data was inserted to the file.
I'll keep poking at it to see if I can remember what if anything
you can do to actually fix this.

[Coolmo]

I just checked out the quick view thing and you're right. It thinks it's in some sort of perspective view but if you type "VIEW" you will see that "perspective" is turned OFF in the current view. Here's something weird too. Apparently the text entities exist because if you start a new drawing and insert the "ghosttext1" drawing into it, the text is recognized and now you can select them. Let me know if ya think of anything. This thing in no way is holding me up on anything, I just want to know WHY!

[Mike.Perry]

Hi

Check out the following Technical Document on the Autodesk web site under the Knowledge Base section -

ID: TS59340 - Plot or preview shows incorrect area of drawing when plotting limits (http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/item?siteID=123112&id=2880566&linkID=2475323)

The above shows you how to reset TARGET to 0,0,0. Once you've done that you should be fit to go.

Have attached "TargetZero_ghosttext1.dwg", this drawing file should be ok! now. I *only* followed the steps in the above Technical Document to achieve the results.

Have a good one, Mike

[Coolmo]

Yup, that worked! Oddly enough the link you sent worked but it seemed to be geared towards plotting (if I was reading correctly) and didn't really mention the ghost entities that you couldn't touch (also.......... if I was reading corrrectly). Thanks for the help. Now I don't have to go crazy staring at these things.

[Mike.Perry]

Yup, that worked! Oddly enough the link you sent worked but it seemed to be geared towards plotting (if I was reading correctly) and didn't really mention the ghost entities that you couldn't touch (also.......... if I was reading corrrectly). Thanks for the help. Now I don't have to go crazy staring at these things.
Hi

As mentioned (hinted at) in my previous post, I *only* referred to the Technical Document to show you a method for resetting the TARGET to 0,0,0.

Have a good one, Mike

[irneb]

Does anyone have a new link to this? The AutoDesk website tells me there's no such page. I know the link was 4 years ago, so maybe it's been moved to some archive?

Anyway, I've come across this problem about 2 years back in AC2005 (before joining AUGI) - didn't get any satisfaction from the AutoDesk forums then. So I simply redid the offending drawing - it was just the one.

Yesterday, one of the guys at our office got this very same problem happening. Absolutely no layer frozen, off or locked. But still 2 texts could not be selected, others could, but not those 2.

Workaround was using Ctrl+A, then MOVE by 0,0. Then it worked as usual. Wish I knew that one 2 years ago!

Does anyone have any clue as to why this happens. I'd be willing to send you a copy of the DWG, but it contains contact info (and due to spam, it's not a good idea to place it in the public domain). And I can't get rid of the contact info without going through the above mentioned workaround - which defeats the purpose of posting the DWG.

BTW, the workaround doesn't work on the ghostetxt.dwg from one of the previous posts. So I assume it's something different?

[ccowgill]

Does anyone have a new link to this? The AutoDesk website tells me there's no such page. I know the link was 4 years ago, so maybe it's been moved to some archive?

Anyway, I've come across this problem about 2 years back in AC2005 (before joining AUGI) - didn't get any satisfaction from the AutoDesk forums then. So I simply redid the offending drawing - it was just the one.

Yesterday, one of the guys at our office got this very same problem happening. Absolutely no layer frozen, off or locked. But still 2 texts could not be selected, others could, but not those 2.

Workaround was using Ctrl+A, then MOVE by 0,0. Then it worked as usual. Wish I knew that one 2 years ago!

Does anyone have any clue as to why this happens. I'd be willing to send you a copy of the DWG, but it contains contact info (and due to spam, it's not a good idea to place it in the public domain). And I can't get rid of the contact info without going through the above mentioned workaround - which defeats the purpose of posting the DWG.

BTW, the workaround doesn't work on the ghostetxt.dwg from one of the previous posts. So I assume it's something different?
is the text that is not selectable a true type font? Do you have an AutoCAD table object in the drawing? I seem to remember this combination affecting the selectability of some text. we have somewhat moved away from true type fonts due to this problem

[irneb]

Yep, in both cases - the text are both MTEXT entities with font type Arial & ArialBold. This for the project name & site description in the title block. Then we've got a table for the revision notes. All other text is ROMANS, it's just these two (which we'd prefer to keep TTF).

I knew that TTF makes for snapping to insertion points difficult , but even a select by crossing over these MTEXT entities don't work at all.

As I've said, we've got the work-around. And after that it doesn't cause any problem - even after restarting AutoCAD. So it's not a cause for concern here - I'd just like to get to the bottom of why this happened. Is it then simply a matter of some bug with TTF? In which case, why does the thing not re-occur after doing the work-around, saving, closing & re-opening?