By Dennis Collin
When teaching new and existing users of AutoCAD I spend a lot of time on the importance of using template files and adhering to company defined standards. Following these rules should ensure files look and behave in an identical and reliable manner. However even in this situation things can be frustrated when receiving AutoCAD drawings from external sources, or when some drawings are modified by contracting staff who have a more ‘fluid’ grasp of the rules.
In AutoCAD, for all annotations I recommend the use of styles, including elements like Text and Mtext entities. The style controls sizing behaviour, appearance and font which will ensure said annotation looks consistent for all project documentation.
However, like many AutoCAD functions these rules can be overridden, and object specific rules can be applied. Whilst this may seem like a versatile approach, left unchecked, can create hours of work correcting hundreds of text entities to display with the correct management approved font and size.
Consider an MText entity, a user can highlight a portion of text and change the font and size to an alternative option. This means that when the text style gets updated individual text entities retain their overridden properties, and if this action is performed regularly or the element copied then this could take hours to fix manually!
Selecting the offending text will display a series of control characters, fonts and sizing overrides, whereas ideally the contents should typically just show the contents of the text. To get the element to follow the style settings, these prefixes need to be removed. However, if there are hundreds of entities this could take time and money. This is option 1. However, if you have full AutoCAD there is a Lisp routine that will make the task so much easier.
I have mentioned accessing Lisp routines before, via the Appload command here.
The original routine can be accessed here courtesy of Steve Doman and Joe Burke at CADABYSS.
https://cadabyss.wordpress.com/2010/01/04/stripmtext-v5-0/
Load the routine and optionally add it to the start-up suite via the Appload command.
Once loaded simply type the new command STRIPMTEXT at the command prompt, select the elements, choose the overrides to remove and click OK. All non-compliant text entities should revert to their default, style defined settings.
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