Copy General Note Labels between drawings?

[Sinc]

Has anyone figured out how to copy General Note Labels between drawings?

I have about 30 General Note labels in one existing drawing that I want to add to another existing drawing. But no matter what I try, all text overrides are lost when the labels are added to the new drawing. I've tried Copy to Clipboard, WBLOCK, and XREF with Bind/Insert - all of them fail to retain the text overrides.

About the best I've been able to manage is to explode the labels into MTEXT, then copy those over. Then use the MTEXT to recreate the labels in the new drawing.

[Anonymous]

"sinc" man:
The best I could do after I tried the copy-paste routine and ended up with a
dozen of the same note(s) was to use EDIT on the Original note, ctrl-c and
ctrl-v in the receiving text of the General Note.

It works fairly easy, just switching back and forth between windows is not
much fun, however.

Bill

wrote in message news:5759238@discussion.autodesk.com...
Has anyone figured out how to copy General Note Labels between drawings?

I have about 30 General Note labels in one existing drawing that I want to
add to another existing drawing. But no matter what I try, all text
overrides are lost when the labels are added to the new drawing. I've tried
Copy to Clipboard, WBLOCK, and XREF with Bind/Insert - all of them fail to
retain the text overrides.

About the best I've been able to manage is to explode the labels into MTEXT,
then copy those over. Then use the MTEXT to recreate the labels in the new
drawing.

[C3D_RickGraham]

Hmmmm, haven't tried this, but it does sound ugly. I guess I haven't run
into this because we xref drawings.

Again, I haven't tried this, but what if you XML Export/Import. Does it
retain the values?

Rick

wrote in message news:5759238@discussion.autodesk.com...
Has anyone figured out how to copy General Note Labels between drawings?

I have about 30 General Note labels in one existing drawing that I want to
add to another existing drawing. But no matter what I try, all text
overrides are lost when the labels are added to the new drawing. I've tried
Copy to Clipboard, WBLOCK, and XREF with Bind/Insert - all of them fail to
retain the text overrides.

About the best I've been able to manage is to explode the labels into MTEXT,
then copy those over. Then use the MTEXT to recreate the labels in the new
drawing.

[C3D_RickGraham]

Hmmmm. I just tried a quickie in 2008 SP2. I Added 2 General Notes (My N/F
notes) and changed each one for seperate notes. I WBLOCK the thing out. And
open that WB drawing, They are there! Perhaps I'm not understanding the
issue?

Rick
wrote in message news:5759419@discussion.autodesk.com...
Hmmmm, haven't tried this, but it does sound ugly. I guess I haven't run
into this because we xref drawings.

Again, I haven't tried this, but what if you XML Export/Import. Does it
retain the values?

Rick

wrote in message news:5759238@discussion.autodesk.com...
Has anyone figured out how to copy General Note Labels between drawings?

I have about 30 General Note labels in one existing drawing that I want to
add to another existing drawing. But no matter what I try, all text
overrides are lost when the labels are added to the new drawing. I've tried
Copy to Clipboard, WBLOCK, and XREF with Bind/Insert - all of them fail to
retain the text overrides.

About the best I've been able to manage is to explode the labels into MTEXT,
then copy those over. Then use the MTEXT to recreate the labels in the new
drawing.

[acoursen]

Why not drag and drop as you would with other styles between dwgs? Unfortunately 30 is a fair amount and it sucks that you can't move a parent and have its children follow obediently.

Andy

[Sinc]

The problem is that I was then trying to add them to another existing drawing.

The WBLOCK works, but now try inserting that into an existing drawing and see what happens...

[Sinc]

The issue is not with the styles.

I have a bunch of General Note Labels all created in one drawing. They all have different text in them, however, added using the "Edit label text..." option. When these labels are copied, they lose the text overrides, and reset to the generic text from the style.

It's similar to the problem where changing the style of an existing Label causes the text overrides to be lost.

[C3D_RickGraham]

OIC. That is stupid and now makes me rethink the General Notes myself.
Autodesk??????

Rick
wrote in message news:5759535@discussion.autodesk.com...
The problem is that I was then trying to add them to another existing
drawing.

The WBLOCK works, but now try inserting that into an existing drawing and
see what happens...

[acoursen]

Ahh. How 'bout this: copy the text within the edited note, and paste into a new style then drag and drop that into your new dwg.

Andy

[Matt.Anderson]

I haven't tried but can you in a toolpallete macro, generate the general note, and have it paste in the default text? or do you need to get creative and program the insertion in Vb?

[Sinc]

I don't quite follow you about the tool palette...

As for custom programming, that is not an option because the labels are not exposed in the API.

I actually ended up exploding the labels into MTEXT and copying the MTEXT into my target drawing. Then I used Copy and Paste to copy the contents of the MTEXT into new labels, and deleting the MTEXT when I was done.

[Matt.Anderson]

Sorry about that, I don't use the general notes very much. I was hoping that they might work simiiliar to QL worked in the past and prompt you for the text after the selection so that you could paste in your text from an ADDNOTELABEL macro.

It doesn't appear that that works. A real waste.

[DesignerGuy1961 · Accepted solution]

The work around I came up with is as follows:

Open the drawing that has the notes you want to copy as Read Only.

Rename the style of the notes you want to copy so that the word "copy" appears as the end.

For example, if the style name is "Existing Conditions", you would rename it "Existing Conditions (Copy)".

Next, select the notes you want to copy and paste them into the desired destination drawing.

This works because you are pasting a new style into your destination drawing. You cannot paste notes from a style that already exists into a destination drawing. Because the source drawing was opened as Read Only, you just close it when you are done without saving.

[dhenderhan]

Awsome....works great!!! Wish there was a way to show this as a solution....I gave kudos, but wante to get this one back at the top of the list.

[DesignerGuy1961]

Thanks, David. I just wish Autodesk would fix this so we wouldn't need a work around. One thing I failed to mention in my previous post, and it's probably obvious, but you can only paste notes from the renamed style into the destination drawing once. Once you paste the notes in, that renamed style now exists in the destination drawing. The way around this is to go into the source drawing again (read only to be safe) and rename the style again with "copy1" at the end. You could do this as many times as necessary. "copy1", "copy2", "copy3", etc. But again, this is probably obvious. I just thought I'd go ahead and mention it to be thorough. 

[pcchenard]

---

@Sinc wrote:
The issue is not with the styles.

I have a bunch of General Note Labels all created in one drawing. They all have different text in them, however, added using the "Edit label text..." option. When these labels are copied, they lose the text overrides, and reset to the generic text from the style.

It's similar to the problem where changing the style of an existing Label causes the text overrides to be lost.

---

Yeah, that is exactly what the problem is and I have run into it too, many times.  The fact that you cannot copy a note to another drawing if the style already exists in the destination drawing, or even change the style for a existing note without it resetting the text back to the default text of the note style is one of the most retarded things I have ever seen.  Do they really expect me to create a different general note style for ever unique note that I need to create?  Because that's not going to happen.  I was really hoping that they would fix this in 2014, but I see that they have not.

[jalneal]

Text overrides definitely have an undesirable behavior - I wish I had discovered that before promoting them in our office - someone wants to change the style of a bunch of things, it wipes out the text overrides.  Since text overides are part of the style and likely rely on a text construct in the style with the same name, I can see there is a logic problem simply copying the overide where text fields may not match.  

A couple of potential easy fixes:

-Create a program that would allow you to select an object with text override and turn it into a unique style. (Are text overrides incorporated into the API?)   You could then use this on all the notes, then copy and paste. 

-Autodesk could modify the program to take anything with a text override on paste and have it create a new style out of it.  If the expeced behavior was ever desired (I can't remotely see where it would be desired) then the question could be posed. 

[phillip.curlin]

What i do is "insert" a base drawing that has all my notes and other standards included, into the drawing i need the notes in.