100 Paper Cuts

[cadtag]

And speaking of Masking, Mtext masking is really not well implemented. the mask area goes from the lower left of the text box, to the upper right. That's well and good if all you have is single line, or a neat, sqaure paragraph. All of my paragraphs though, have ragged edges. & often, the first line of a call out will be substantially longer than the next three, which means the mask covers a lot of drawing that it shouldn't.

It should not be that hard to calculate the actual length of each line with the actual font in use, and just mask the extents of each lines area. Even nicer would be an ability to just mask around the individual glyphs in the character string -- giving us a free 'halo' or 'glow' text effect.

[Opie]

And speaking of Masking, Mtext masking is really not well implemented. the mask area goes from the lower left of the text box, to the upper right. That's well and good if all you have is single line, or a neat, sqaure paragraph. All of my paragraphs though, have ragged edges. & often, the first line of a call out will be substantially longer than the next three, which means the mask covers a lot of drawing that it shouldn't.

It should not be that hard to calculate the actual length of each line with the actual font in use, and just mask the extents of each lines area. Even nicer would be an ability to just mask around the individual glyphs in the character string -- giving us a free 'halo' or 'glow' text effect.

I believe that (or something similar) was added to the wish list at one time in the past.

[cadtag]

Here's another one: The Express tool Text to Mtext has to be one of the most widely used Express tools around. It's baffling why it has not been incorporated into the core and is still lingering as an unsupported yet vital tool. But it's got a problem -- although both TEXT and MTEXT entities support fields, the Txt2mtxt command converts the fields to their text value. The expected behavior would be to retain the field, not convert it to its value.

[BlackBox]

Here's another one: The Express tool Text to Mtext has to be one of the most widely used Express tools around. It's baffling why it has not been incorporated into the core and is still lingering as an unsupported yet vital tool. But it's got a problem -- although both TEXT and MTEXT entities support fields, the Txt2mtxt command converts the fields to their text value. The expected behavior would be to retain the field, not convert it to its value.

That's exactly why it hasn't been integrated into AutoCAD's core (I suspect)... In addition to fixing the few issues noted, the current source code is written in LISP (which Autodesk has no interest in evolving), whereas AutoCAD's core architecture is ObjectARX, on top of AutoCAD Windows, on top of ObjectCRX (AcCore.dll), on top of ObjectDBX (AcDbXX.dll). From ObjectARX we derive both the .NET and LISP APIs.

Integration into AutoCAD's core implicitly requires that the source LISP be rewritten in at minimum .NET or ObjectARX, so long as they can effectively replicate the Fields, etc. that you aptly point out. I say that as LISP is able to access the Field's formatted output via TextString Property, and the FieldCode itself via the aptly named FieldCode Method, but LISP (AFAIK) does not expose a means by which one can identify which string characters from TextString are associated with said FieldCode. This is the crux of accomplishing what you're after, to my mind.

Porting this myself is a bit more than I have time to chew (if I am capable?), but I'll have to dig through Kean's Accessing the AutoCAD objects referred to by fields using .NET article, as I would have use for this in my 'Match Text' routine, which allows me to quickly, well, match TextStrings between Text, MText, and MLeaders, etc... So for that, I thank you for bringing up the topic here.

[Iceberg]

BCOUNT COMMAND

Doesn't not work well with dynamic blocks..... This was my staple command for counting up all of my blocks quickly in a drawing.

[BlackBox]

BCOUNT COMMAND

Doesn't not work well with dynamic blocks..... This was my staple command for counting up all of my blocks quickly in a drawing.

I agree that the OOTB Command *should* be able to do this... But this has been resolved many times by the use of a simple Visual LISP routine... Methinks a search will brighten your day.