What's going on? Dwg's with a mind of their own!

K H

 I hope someone can help.

I have four UK Ordnance Survey map tiles in dwg format. Each dwg has multiple layers. When I open the .dwg's individually they look and appear sound.

However if I try to Insert>Insert Block and either insert once of the .dwgs into a new drawing or open up one the dwg's in one of the other dwg drawings, the text layers only are placed incorrectly. I end up with road names on top of buildings etc. 

Why does this happen? What do I need to do to stop it occuring? It's only the various text layers that are misplaced. It's driving me mad.

Richard Webb

 Not addressing the offsets you're seeing via Insert | Insert Block directly, but did you try a select all then copy/paste or paste-as-block between the drawings? The underlying mechanism going through that route (no pun intended) may be different enough to function as a work-around.

Roy Klein Gebbinck

One reason why this can happen:
The text entities in each dwg are part of an insert and their blocknames are not unique.
The solution can then be to use the xref mechanism: create a new dwg and xref the map tiles.

K H

 I would open a drawing (OS map tile). Everything is fine. Then I would go:

Insert>Insert Block>Browse [select the second .dwg file I wish to open in the same drawing]>Open>OK

The second OS tile will position perfectly next to the original OS tile (ie. roads and buildings snap together et) however, the text layers are not aligned at all. Interestingly none of the text is beyond the geographic boundaries of the tile either.

I'm bamboozled! Have you encountered this or any ideas what is happening?

K H

 Thank you for your reply Roy. Yes that is a work around.

However, all layers in each OS tile (.dwg) are the same for each tile. Why is it just the text layers mis-locating?

Roy Klein Gebbinck

@ Kevin:
I can only guess that all text entities are nested in a block, but other entities are not.
To check if my suspicion is correct:
- Open each separate dwg.
- Check if the texts are nested in a block.
- Check if the block name is the same for every drawing.

Other solutions that can work:
- Rename the text block in each separate dwg to a unique name before combining using the _INSERT command.
- Explode the text block in each dwg before combining using the _INSERT command.

Hans De Backer

The same annotative entity can be placed at different locations per annotative scale.
Text is one of the entity types that can be annotative, so it could be interesting to check whether these texts are annotative.
If you file a support request and attach the drawings our analysts will be glad to help out.

Best regards

K H

 Ok, so I never fully resolved this issue. 

@Roy

In each drawing, each road name is nested in an individual block all with unique insertion points similar to: 531342.7,184844.4,0.0

There are the same block names in each drawing also, but there are a large number of them, It's not practical to edit and rename each layer, unless there is an easy or quick way to do this. 

@Hans

I shall do that shortly if I can't resolve this. Thank you.

Roy Klein Gebbinck

I think you should try the explode option. You can probably (hopefully they are on the same layer) use Quick Select to easily select all the blocks you mention. If the block names have a fixed portion than a few lines of Lisp code can also work:
[code](defun c:Test ( / ss)
  (if (setq ss (ssget '((2 . "*FixedNamePortion*"))))
    (command "_.explode" ss)
  )
  (princ)
)[/code]

Roy Klein Gebbinck

Oops... 'than' should be 'then'...