Expert: Bill DeShawn - 7/8/2007

Question
Hi, I'm a traffic engineer and I'm working with a network of a big city, I imported a file from a GIS program (Transcad) to dxf format and opened it in autocad 2005, the file is full of little blocks with the shape of zones of the city, each block have five or six attributes containing the zone name, id, size, etc.
my problem is that when I turn visible the attributes hardly can see anything because the attributes fonts are too big with respect the blocks and all are in the same position,one over the another, for a block.
I tried too shrink and move the attributes but I only can do it for one block and one attribute at a time, and I have hundreds of blocks and thousands of attributes so I have no time to do such thing. I want to know if there is a way to do this as a batch process or edit in some way the dxf file to extract the attributes out of the blocks.

Answer
Hola, Cici.
Sure.  I'd be glad to help.  I started to give you some instructions, but then I realized that all the blocks have different names, and that none of the blocks can be the same.  In my estimation, somebody made a bad choice of objects to use.  It would have been better to create text and group it with the polyline that made up the shape of the city zones.  There is no global attribute height change routine that I know of, as I've never run into this kind of problem.  There is an EXPRESS TOOL: BURST.  What it will do is to cause the block to be exploded, but the attributes will turn into text and much more easily selectable.  After that's done, load and use SSX:
(load "ssx")
(ssx)
to select one of the text objects that you want to change height on.  You can Use the PROPERTIES Palette and Select
"p" for previous.  Then all the text with the same style, layer, and color properties will be selected.  Hopefully, that won't include any other text in the drawing, but only the text that got created from "BURSTING" the blocks.  Once selected, the PROPERTIES palette can assist you in globally changing the height of the selected text.

In the future, such zones should probably be grouped with either named groups or unnamed groups.  Check into using groups with HELP.  Grouped objects can be made temporarily ungrouped by typing CTRL+H. CTRL+H can be used to toggle the groups on and off.


BATTMAN and EATTEDIT will only work on one block name at a time, so they wont be able to cut it for you.

If this causes other such problems for you, send me another request for help, and we'll see what we can do.

This can also cause other people where you work to have to learn how to use groups.  But if they need to physically associate 100's of polylines with thousands of text and then change the text size, 100's of block names are not going to "cut the mustard".  Groups are the way to go in this case.

Keep in touch
Bill DeShawn
http://my.sterling.net/~bdeshawn