Change text style!

Hey!

I got a work that I have to change around 1200 drawings from Microsoft Visio to AutoCad 2009. One annoying thing is that the Visio drawings got Arial as text style and my company want everything in their own textstyle.

So at the moment I single click all text bar and change the style, there must be a faster way to fix this.

I look through so threads and havn't found anything that solved this, so sorry if this is repost.

Thanks for fast replies!

- Robin F

You have to change the text style in 1200 drawings? Sounds like a job for a batch processing script.

You have to change the text style in 1200 drawings?

Yes, acctually 1234 drawing but already managed about 100. It is alot more the text to change, some lines gets really wierd and where to lines conect i have to do a kind of symbol.

But yes, a script would be great. If I only knew how to do them

If it is more than just changing a text style then some additional information will be required. Batch processing via a script works best when the same change(s) have to be made to each and every drawing.

Well the most consuming part is to change text style. The other things they vary so I can do them manually.

Isn't there a command that change all text styles in a drawing, or that I can select several text boxes?

Thanks for the fast response

The point is you want to do this another 1233 times isn't it?

How many text styles are going to be changed in a single drawing?

Yeah, I have to do it some times..

In each drawing it is 10-40 text boxes that have to be changed and all will go from Arial to isocp.

This is what you said previously: "...change all text styles in a drawing." That's why I asked if you were changing more than one text style. The script doesn't care if there are four instances of text that use the style or forty thousand; it's still only one style. Understand?

Yes I understand. And I only change one text style from Arial to isocp. When I said "all text styles" I ment text boxes, sorry for that.

So yes there is only one text style to change. Arial -> Isocp

Read this brief tutorial about writing a script by Ellen Finkelstein and tell me if you understand it or not.

http://www.ellenfinkelstein.com/acadblog/tutorial-automate-tasks-with-a-script-file/

I've read it now but i don't understand how I should write it. Not how I should write that it will change several texts. The first line i guess should be something like "Select an annotation object or [undo]:" because that is what enters the command box when I want to change the style. Can you please give me a start so I can finish it?

Thanks!

You forgot already it seems. You are changing one STYLE and you are doing it globally (i.e. - the entire drawing).

Since a script cannot directly access a dialog box one must use the command line version of the command itself. In the tutorial I pointed you to that was the -script command.

Yeah I will be changing one style and I understand that it will change the entire drawing.

But I dont understand how I will write the script that i will change all text boxes. The command version i guess is DDEDIT...

Sorry, I am new to this..

Forget "all the text boxes" please. Concentrate on the one text style. Here is a sample script.

_open

C:\test.dwg

-style

standard

isocp

0

1

0

n

n

qsave

close

Changing the text style will only work if the styles have not been overwritten in the MText box, which is often the case with converted files. There are a couple of LISPs around that will easily remove that formatting from all of the text entities. I use STPMtext. That is a simple one, others have some nice options.

You can use Lee Mac's Script Writer to simplify your script and handle the task of batch processing. Find it here...

http://lee-mac.com/scriptwriter.html

Did you at least test the sample script file?

The above script file assumes that you used the default text style named "Standard" that happens to have the Arial font assigned to it. All the script does is change the font to Isocp then it saves the drawing.