How to determine text 'width'

Richard Sands

Is there a way (setting?) that shows the width of a selected text?
I have text tables created in another program that needs manipulating and centering (the justification is up the creek).
I can't see any easy way to add it to an existing or newly created text table in B'Cad as they are just all individual text entities.

I want to add vertical lines parallel and offset equally from the extremities of each text column.
I can easily pick the centre of the text as its Justified Centre and whilst its not a big deal to manually offset by eye it would be far easier if i could just parallel offset the known 1/2 width plus clearance.

I'm probably going about this all wrong way and there could even be  away just to dump all the text into something else and edit there?
If so please correct my ways, but I'd still like to be able to know the actual width a text entity takes up.

Thanks

Louis_Verdonck

Dear Richard

In the Applications Catalog on the Bricsys website you can download Sofoco Tools, which contains a Text to Mtext tool. This tool allows to convert single line text entities to Mtexts. The width of Mtexts can be controlled in the Properties Bar. Select an Mtext to see its current width and type a new value in the Width field to modify. Select multiple MTexts to apply the same width to the selection.

Richard Sands

Thanks Louis
I have Sofoco Tools - an excellent suite.
But that won't do the job for me.
My survey program reports out in tabular form a series of line information.
Line No  Bearing  Distance
1  123°25'36"  45.236
2 145°45'12"  52.145

It's all right-justified which looks a bit odd and is easy to centre justify the text so all columns are centred.
That changes the effective space between each set of horizontal text.
I move it to look right, but then want lines between each row and each column. The existing row lines can be used as that doesn't change, just how far left or right they extend

MText would work to put it all into one entity, but there is a lot of manual aligning and I still have the column lines to draw.

It takes me about 1/2 hour to correct 25-30 sets of annotations which is tedious and I'd like to do better.
That can be doubled if a freeze or crash occurs as did tonight and all was lost!

Knut Hohenberg

Hi Richard,
if I understand you right, you are talking about text already in a drawing, not in a text file?
Instead of tinkering with these texts, I would rather try to export them to a csv file and then create a table from that (using the "from Data" option of the table dialog).
Maybe you want to have a look at https://sites.google.com/site/cadkits/home/text2csv
Never used this one, though, since I never ran into this kind of problem...

martin@enco.us

Richard

I use the attached to middle-center or left-center justify text in a schedule where the schedule grid is made up of line entities.  It accepts multiple text entities in each box.  Maybe it will do what you want.

mc_text.lsp

Terry Dotson

The best approach would be to convert it to a table object.  There are tools to do that and more in our ToolPac product.  If you want, email me an example drawing for conversion testing and I'll send the results.

Richard Sands

Thanks for many replies.

Martin I couldn't get that Lisp to work.
it'd run but after selecting text it gave an error message
I'm running 14.1.11

; ----- LISP : Call Stack -----
; [0]...C:MC
; [1].....REALIGN_BOX_TEXT <<--<br>;
; ----- Error around expression -----
(C:EE-TJUST SSNEW "MC")
;
; error : no function definition ; expected FUNCTION at [EVAL]

@Knut
Yes text already in dwg.
(they are all indivdual text entities, not lines of text as I showed above)
I also couldn't get TEXT2CSV.VLX file to work.
I'm sure I used a vlx file in psat.
Just dragged it into B'cad and Voila!

I have sent dwg to you Terry.
Regards
Richard

martin@enco.us

The missing function is attached.  This is a modified version of the tjust function from acettxt.lsp, which is part of the Express Tools.

ee_tjust.lsp