MTEXT does this weird thing

[wkiernan]

I am editing a block of MTEXT for a legend in my survey drawing.  MTEXT1.GIF shows what I am starting with.  When I typed this in in the first place I got to the line reading

NO.    NUMBER

which I created by typing in "N", "O", "," (comma) (tab) "N" "U" "M" "B" "E" "R" (enter)

Now I click on the MTEXT entity and it opens up in the MTEXT editor, and I put the cursor right before the first letter in "NUMBER," as shown in MTEXT2.GIF.  I hit the backspace key, expecting it will delete the previous character (the tab character) but it doesn't back up one character, instead it deletes everything back to the beginning of the line, and what's worse, it changes the first part of the next line, which used to read

OCC.   OCCUPIED

so that the following line reads

NO.   OCCUPIED.

as you can see in MTEXT3.GIF.  It does this in AutoCAD 2007 and also in AutoCAD 2014.  So I have three questions.  First, what in the world is going on?  Second, can I turn this incredibly annoying behavior off?  Third, if I move to California, will I too be able to buy some of the awesome dope the guys who wrote the MTEXT editor were smoking?

[nrz13 · Accepted solution]

What you're seeing is automatic bulleted lists.  AutoCAD interprets (period) (tab) as an ordered list.  It works great for numbers or when you actually want an ordered list using A., B., C., etc., but in cases like this it's a pain.  You can backspace over it and manually recreate it one time and it will hold properly until you next open the MTEXT, or you can disable automatic lists altogether by unchecking "Allow Bullets and Lists" (see graphic below).

[howdylee903]

So if I'm understanding this correctly in practice, at least within a particular drawing, the option for allowing or not allowing bullets and lists applies to all text within the drawing. So that means I am not allowed to have one item of mtext that I do NOT want bulleted, and one other item that I DO wanted bulleted? What sense that does make?!?!?

Riddle me this then... I have a dwg file that was created a couple months ago. I opened to edit some mtext today. When I edit the text that includes: "Exist. store to remain open....", the "Exist." part is now a bullet (and I KNOW that is not how it was created!) BUT when a coworker opens the same drawing, it does not appear to be a bullet. Is there a settings difference between our machines that would change existing text to become bullets regardless of how it was created?

[howdylee903]

My menu looks a little different. In the same right-click menu that has "allow bullets and lists", above it is "use tab delimiter only".

When that is checked, it allows you to have abbreviations within text, as long as you don't use the tab directly after it.

The problem comes when you have a typical abbreviations key (like at the beginning of project drawings), to make things nice and neat, you typically want to tab over for paragraph alignment purposes, but it wrecks havoc with the bullets. But we can't NOT allow bullets because on that same page is the general notes that are automatically numbered via bullets. Makes no sense 😞

[nrz13]

I get what you're saying, but I know of no way around it with how AutoCAD is currently designed.  For me, at least, the option to allow bullets and lists is a global option, not per drawing.  If it were per drawing, you could xref your problem text into the drawing that you want to have bulleted lists in.  We usually use tables for text that needs to be spaced out in the way you're talking about, so it's rarely a problem for us, but I definitely see how it would be a problem for some.

As for your example of "Exist. store to remain open....", I've never seen abbreviated text automatically turned into bullets that wasn't followed by a tab, so I have no advice to offer there.

Edit:  If you're comfortable using tables, as a workaround you could use a table with no borders or borders set to true-value color 255,255,255 (assuming you're printing on white paper) and put your abbreviations list there.  It would still look the same, assuming you formatted the table the way you wanted it, but you would avoid this automatic list conflict.

[Ressag]

Did you ever find a solution to this. I have a user that has this exact problem and it just started out of the blue. If I open the file, no problems, if I right click and look at bullets and numbering it is set to off. If I do the same on theirs, this particular text with a period or parentheses is set to bullets being on.

[nrz13]

Ressag:

If I understand your question correctly, then you just need to disable bullets on the computer having problems.  It's a system setting, not a drawing setting, so it needs to be adjusted on all systems.

[Ressag]

In the MTEXT editor, I right clicked, selected "Bullets and Lists", then checked "Use Tab Delimiter Only" - this fixed the issue.

[Ressag]

In the MTEXT editor, I right clicked, selected “Bullets and Lists”, then checked “Use Tab Delimiter Only” – this fixed the issue.

[JBerns]

I was quite surprised today that this auto-lettering problem remains in AutoCAD 2019.

I happened to be typing text with hanging indents.

Lines that begin with words of six-letters or less were converted to auto-lettered lists.

Seven or more characters are not converted.

Who decided seven letters is the threshold? Can this be changed by the user to one letter?

I disabled auto-lettering, corrected the lines so they were again text, not lists.

Another user edited the text on their system. They happened to have auto-lettering enabled. The lines with six-letter words or less at the beginning were again converted to lists u[on entering the text editor. That should NOT happen!

VERY frustrating.

More control per drawing or per paragraph will be required if six letters is the auto-list threshold.

Regards,

Jerry

[shaun.cavey]

I was getting same results and very frustrating.  I had 'MODEL:' which kept auto-formatting as a list every time I opened up the MTEXT to edit.  I added an extra space character at the end which fixed the problem.  It looks like the space character helps it achieve that >6 character threshold.  It's now 'MODEL: ' [<- space character at the end] which worked for me as a workaround.