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CAD Mtext Gremlin

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(@spledeus)
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Last year we had the issue on an AutoCAD Map 2014 system and I think I resolved it but I cannot recall how.
Today a Tech opened a drawing on Civil3d 2014. He had been working on it all week with no issue. Now the issue:

All MTEXT objects have multiple fonts. Certain letters are drawn with Arial where the TextStyle is Simplex. Other letters remain in simplex. Even more of a mystery: This issue is Caps sensitive - Uppercase M is in Arial, Lower Case m is in simplex. It affects some capital and some lovercase.

The contents in properties shows a plethora of coding gibberish to set the fonts for each letter.

The issue last year affect Capital I. This year it is affecting at least 15 letters.

I tried a LSP called StripMtext, but that did nothing.

I tried manually changing the font inside the Mtext - it failed and added a 3rd font into the mix.

Match properties seems to work, but it will take the Tech a good amount of time to fix all the text blocks. (Engineering drawing).

Any guesses?

 
Posted : 02/02/2016 7:20 am
(@paden-cash)
Posts: 11088
 

Wish I could help. But thank you for reminding me why I enjoy Bentley products so much...

 
Posted : 02/02/2016 7:24 am
(@spledeus)
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paden cash, post: 356135, member: 20 wrote: Wish I could help. But thank you for reminding me why I enjoy Bentley products so much...

Because they work perfectly?

 
Posted : 02/02/2016 7:38 am
(@bobwesterman)
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I've seen something similar to this. All that code gibberish you're seeing in the properties, does it have anything to do with proxy fonts?

Were these text entities at one time labels that have been exploded?

 
Posted : 02/02/2016 7:38 am
(@paden-cash)
Posts: 11088
 

spledeus, post: 356138, member: 3579 wrote: Because they work perfectly?

They work pretty good. I really can't ever remember any hiccups I've had with MS...ever. Really.

AutoCAD, on the other hand, seemed to come up with new glitches all the time. I remember a lot of gremlins with text and Mtext. The one that really bugged me (among all the others) was "automatic lockup" if you accidently tried to hatch an area that wasn't closed.

I hope you get some help, I know how frustrating it can be.

 
Posted : 02/02/2016 7:47 am
(@spledeus)
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bobwesterman, post: 356139, member: 7106 wrote: I've seen something similar to this. All that code gibberish you're seeing in the properties, does it have anything to do with proxy fonts?

Were these text entities at one time labels that have been exploded?

The code gibberish does include font overrides.
I would like to say that these were always MTEXT, but some may have been TEXT converted to MTEXT several years ago. I do not believe any were labels.

Paden, I have tried PowerSurvey and the lack of the ESC key really turned me off. Someday I may return to it... but I have miles to go before I sleep.

 
Posted : 02/02/2016 7:59 am
(@paden-cash)
Posts: 11088
 

spledeus, post: 356146, member: 3579 wrote: The code gibberish does include font overrides.
I would like to say that these were always MTEXT, but some may have been TEXT converted to MTEXT several years ago. I do not believe any were labels.

Paden, I have tried PowerSurvey and the lack of the ESC key really turned me off. Someday I may return to it... but I have miles to go before I sleep.

There is a "translation" hurdle to get over when it comes to mouse/ keyboard input.

 
Posted : 02/02/2016 8:01 am
(@randy-rain)
Posts: 462
 

Download this, then place it in a trusted location. Type appload and surf to the file and load it, then type stripmtext follow the prompts should allow you to remove all of the formatting. Hope this helps.

P.S.

I use this utility all of the time to remove embedded color formatting from mtext in provided files.

 
Posted : 02/02/2016 10:59 am
(@spledeus)
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Thank you Randy. I tried this without success before I posted here. I will keep it in my library for the future.

 
Posted : 02/02/2016 11:26 am
(@skwyd)
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One of the things I've seen in dealing with engineering drawings is that a lot of the text our engineers put into their drawings was put together in a word processor first (like MS Word) and then cut-and-pasted into the Mtext entity in CAD. It usually works alright. But if that text (often specs for different aspects of the job) is copied from one drawing to the next, I've seen it slowly "fall apart" and get these strange format characters in them. It is likely that the formatting was already there from the start, but either a newer version of CAD (or some other patch or upgrade) has caused them to show their effect.

The only solution I've found for these is to retype them solely from within CAD. Cutting and pasting from other programs rarely works well. The only file type I've had success with is the simple text file (.txt) that doesn't have any hidden formatting.

Short answer, I don't think there is an easy fix.

 
Posted : 03/02/2016 9:33 am
(@spledeus)
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I do not believe any of the MTEXT objects were DOC/DOCX imports. This is part of a template that was created long long ago. It might have been created with CAD 14, CAD 12 and parts could have been originally created in earlier versions. I rebuilt the template in 2002 using CAD12, then a few years later using CAD 2003. We have modified the template over the years.

This drawing was fine one day, then was hit with a gremlin the next day. It is a standard septic design we have been designing for quite some time.

 
Posted : 03/02/2016 10:35 am