topic Re: Text showing a ? in AutoCAD Forum

Text showing a ?

Anonymous — Wed, 28 Oct 2015 23:20:21 GMT

Hi, I have an autocad set up to import text from an excel file to populate title block etc. When the text comes in any line with - as in PG-123 is shown as a ? as in PG?123. When i click on text and check the properties it is showing as PG-123 but text on drawing is PG?123. Any ide why this would be happening.

Test as it appears on drawing.

Text as it appears on properties box:

Re: Text showing a ?

imadHabash — Thu, 29 Oct 2015 05:42:23 GMT

Hi,

it's clear that these (?) mark come instead of (-) mark . some times it's happening when AutoCAD can't recognize these symbols from other software fonts.

to fix it .. use FIND command line and it will be DONE as you wish.

Good Luck..

Re: Text showing a ?

pendean — Thu, 29 Oct 2015 13:27:23 GMT

What font is being used? AutoCAD cannot find it.

Re: Text showing a ?

Kent1Cooper — Thu, 29 Oct 2015 13:29:01 GMT

Sometimes word processors like MS Word [and apparently Excel, too] use "smart" punctuation characters that may look like ordinary ones but are not really. The more obvious example is quotation marks that look like little 6's at the beginnings of quotes and like little 9's at the ends, even though you type them using the same key. Similarly, so-called M-dashes and N-dashes that result from typing two hyphens in a row, depending on whether they have characters or spaces immediately adjacent. They're substituted specialty characters in place of what pressing a keyboard key feeds in. I suspect that's what's happening here -- not a question of the font, but of a "smart" hyphen of some kind.

I haven't dug into this, but you might try exploring in Excel whether there's a setting that will have it use plain ASCII hyphens instead of any specialty variety.

Or look at the actual entity-data text content entry for that Text or Mtext object:

(cdr (assoc 1 (entget (car (entsel "\nSelect Text/Mtext object: ")))))

and it will probably have some special-character-defining code in place of the question marks, which you could replace with plain hyphens using (vl-string-subst).

Or if you can, feed the Excel content to a plain-text editor like Notepad, and read it into AutoCAD from there. That ought to strip any specialness off the hyphens, though I don't guarantee it.

Re: Text showing a ?

Anonymous — Thu, 29 Oct 2015 17:07:10 GMT

thanks for all your mesages below. Finally figured out what the problem was. I had imported the information from an excel file, someone else had populated, to MS Access so i could reexport to my own format excel sheet. The original excel sheet had used alt+0173 charcacter instead of - and this is why AutoCAD did not recognise it. Did a find and replace of alt+0173 to - and then did my import to MS Access and the export to my own excel format. Once I did that everything is good.