Maintaining Control Globally - Text and Dims

[3dway]

Hi all,

I'm a big believer in maintaining global control over as many things as possible.

Consequently, I'll make changes to the text style, dim style, whatever, before making changes the properties of any given object.

In the last few releases I've had trouble with this. There are a couple of usual suspects, and I'm looking for any tips I can get about maintaining global control.

This is further complicated by the fact that I'm a one man show, contractor working for other architects in files that may, or may not have originated in my office.

I will also use annotative text styles occasionally. But when I do, Things seem to behave as expected, changing the annotation scale for model space and the viewports etc.

When I'm not using annotative text.

I regularly use mtextcf = mtext clear formatting.

So my annoyances in recent releases are these:
-often mtext gets some formatting in it, size formatting in particular, and when I try to correct text size by making the change in the text style, the body of mtext doesn't chagne, even after having used mtextcf on it.

The part that bugs me to no end, is I go change the style off to something else, then change it back to the one I want (where it was before) and suddenly the size is right now. Why do I have to do this, when I can't do it from the style text height? What is magical about changing it to another style then back? I feel like, if I can understand what goes on with that style switch, I'll be closer to getting control back my style.

Attributes are a special animal, I understand, but updates to the text style never affect them. They hold the format the got when they were inserted. I'm not expecting much freedom here, but it exists, I'd love to learn it.

Dimension styles aren't too bad. These seem to generally behabe as they used to.

Thanks for any tips or leads.

I'm also interested in any other CAD management type responses that have anything to do with changing the appearance of things and controlling it from one place for any objects.

[irneb]

The thing with text styles is that you must see the height in the style as more of a "default" than a "setting" (not entirely but nearly the same). It's the "default" height when you create a piece of text. Once it's created that height is saved as a property of the text object, you can see this by selecting text & opening the Properties Palette.

Where the above description breaks down is with other styles such as dims, here a text style height governs them all. And as you've noted changing text back & forth between styles will also update their height to this "default" height.

As for other management thingy's I like using Standards to match styles & layers between my drawings.

Dims (and especially MLeaders) are prone to becoming broken from their styles. If any of them have a property override, they tend to not become updated when the style changes (even if the override is something else). Unfortunately there's no "quick fix" for this, you need to change their styles back & forth as well ... uhm ... for dims there's always the -DimStyle Apply command.

[jpaulsen]

Your MTEXTCF command must be a custom routine or it was added after 2009. There are other custom routines out there that may work better. If all else fails copy and past the contents of the MTEXT into Notepad then copy and paste it from Notepad back into a new MTEXT object.

I try to avoid adding formatting through the MTEXT editor. Instead I like to change formatting using the Properties dialog. For as along as I can remember the height of text will change when you change the style but you have to "change" it to something else. If you try to pick the style that the text is current;y you aren't making any changes. That is why you have to change it to something else and then back tot he style you had originally.

[Opie]

Your MTEXTCF command must be a custom routine or it was added after 2009.

It is not a command in either 2010 or 2011.

[H-Angus]

It's a lisp routine that somebody has written.

[3dway]

Yeah it's a lisp. Sorry. The other one I use is stripmtext. It's much more robust.

So I have more text questions.

I have a site plan with elevation points on it. Each elevation marker from the surveyor is a text object and a block which is a little "x". Two separte objects. I'd like them to be all at 45 degrees off of the "x". I've used the properties tool to make all of these middle left justify, and I've labouriously moved the insterts to the x.

Now I want to put about four spaces in front of the text. I tried to be cheeky and put spaces into the contents field in front of the *varies*, and I ended up with a few hundred elevation tags which said "*varies*" with about four spaces in the front. So I was hoping that there was an operator like "<> " for dims which tells AutoCAD... leave the contents as they are, but put these spaces into all those mtext objects. I know it's not the same thing as for dims since it's reporting a distance. Just hoping there was some wildcard.

Probably a lisp which reads the contents then puts in "input" then follows that with the old contents it read, is the thing here. Too bad I can't program.


AND on Annotative Text.

I notice now that I can change the position, justify, etc of any mtext by annotative scale. IE X different locations, X different justifications etc for X annotation scales. If I don't want to go do all of these twice, and I want to to something like left or right justify both in most cases, how do you match choose not to have different info for these settings for different anno scales?

[3dway]

Duh for me....

If I've already made the text angle uniform, and placed them all at the center of the X, then just isolate the layer and move them all with the same relative coordinates.

[H-Angus]

Can you not just select them all (using quick select) and move them?

Or I probably don't quite understand what you mean.

[3dway]

Yes, that was exactly the solution that should have been obvious.

OK so I have a problem where, now that I've applied two annotative scales to all of these mtext objects, the 1:50 ones are all piled up around 0,0. But not exactly. Not sure how that happened.

Any ideas how to get them back where they belong? All of the 1:100 ones are right.

I'm going to try removing the 1:50 the re-add it.

[Opie]

Yes, that was exactly the solution that should have been obvious.

OK so I have a problem where, now that I've applied two annotative scales to all of these mtext objects, the 1:50 ones are all piled up around 0,0. But not exactly. Not sure how that happened.

Any ideas how to get them back where they belong? All of the 1:100 ones are right.

I'm going to try removing the 1:50 the re-add it.

Have you tried the annoreset command?