Expert: Scott Cook - 2/21/2008

Question
Hello. I have been using AutoCad for many uears now and I have never found a lisp routine that will automatically read the elevation of a point that I pick and flag it out for me on a leader line. I use this to do survey mapping for our clients that want hard copy maps showing elevations.
Thanks for your time!

Answer
It seems to me that an elev attribute was used in the point block at other places with no leader at a civil firm I worked with. You could do that too if the points weren't too crowded.
Anyways this is certainly doable and not too complex of a task. You will need to write it yourself, or hire someone to write it for you. It's probably only a couple hours work if you don't try and get too fancy.

The steps I would recommend you take are:
1. Change your point block to contain an elev attribute, with no text visible by default.
2. write a routine to take a selection of objects (so you can do a window or all), filter them to be only point blocks, then read the z and fill in each elev attribute, which would then become visible.
3. by hand, the cad operator would then need to examine the drawing and move the attributes around a bit, probably adding leaders to a few. only at that time would your requirement for a leader line come into play - Basically, I'd only use leaders when needed, otherwise I'd position them close to the point. If the point and elev are in the same block, you could draw the leader automatically because all the information the routine needs to know is contained in the block - insertion point, and position of the text, so you could put that leader in with one pick.

Scott