Converting Polylines Back to text

[adeebr]

Hi,

I have received an dwg file from a client where all the text had been exploded. I need to convert these back to text. I was wondering if there was a way to do this. I have looked into some existing plugins such as raster design which uses OCR technology to recognize text. However to use that feature i need to insert a raster image which I i don't want to do. I was wondering if there is some way to detect text from polylines in the dwg file. Thanks.

[hwalker]

Welcome to the Forums

Unfortunately there is no way for Autocad to recognise polylines as text.

[pendean]

Print it then run it through your scanner's OCR software.

[adeebr]

That's sort of what I am trying to do right now. However most online OCR softwares that I am finding aren't doing a very good job at recognizing the text. Here is what I have done so far:

- Take a screen capture and run the screen capture through an ocr software.

- Take a screen capture, edit the image in gimp to invert the image which would make it more readable by an ocr software

- JPGOUT command however that is pretty much the same as screen capture

- Plot to pdf but the pdf is not big enough and I can't zoom into the words 

I have attached a screen capture of a word that I am trying to recognize.

[pendean · Accepted solution]

Print to paper, black letter on white paper, and run it through a scanner with OCR software. You need to get a quality OCR software (paid): I've never used a free one on the web that was worth much, especially if you are asking it to find dark blue letters on a black background.

BLACK letters on a WHITE background is the way to get good performance out of OCR software.

Or start typing: I suspect you've wasted more time finding a fix already?

[rkmcswain]

adeebr wrote:

I have received an dwg file from a client where all the text had been exploded. I need to convert these back to text.

I'm curious why you're looking for a technical solution for what seems to be a communication problem?

Why did your client explode the text?

Have you asked him for a version where the text is not exploded?

Surely your client wants to help you and not cause you to spend more time on his project.

[adeebr]

Unforetunately I do not know why our client keeps sending files with exploded text. Since we've tried asking them but they didn't change. The thing we are separated from these CAD files by 2 degrees. Our client gets it from someone else.

[adeebr]

Thank you. I am developing a program that uses OCR technology to pickup the exlploded text. 

[sopcic2 · Accepted solution]

I had something similar occur to me when importing from a PDF. *using AutoCAD LT 2018 * I was able to convert my broken text to text with Insert>Recognize SHX Text

[sharpl]

Can you please detail the steps? Thank you! 

[cadffm]

When you start the PDFIMPORT you will see what that mean.

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/autocad/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2018/ENU/AutoC...

[jomcardle]

This worked really well!