@Anonymous wrote:
FIND works for dimensin text that has been added or over-written in the dimension. It will not find the default dimension value because that isn't text.
That is the key. It's only a textual-conversion representation of what is actually stored as a numerical value. I don't think the assertion that this tool worked yesterday in Posts 4 / 5 can be true -- it has never worked that way in my experience.
To illustrate, type this in:
(entget (car (entsel)))
and select a Dimension with default representing-the-actual-measurement text content. There will be an entry in the resulting entity data list that looks like this:
(1 . "")
That's what shows in the "Text override" slot in properties, as mentioned by @cadffm in Post 2. And that is what the FIND command is looking at. It's the very same entry [a dotted pair starting with 1] that contains the text content of all the other things FIND can work with -- Text and Mtext and Attributes, as well as Dimensions if there's any actual text overriding or adding to the measured distance [or angle].
If you override the text in a Dimension, and do the same (entget (car (entsel))) thing, you'll see:
(1 . "Your override text content")
and FIND will be able to work with that. If you edit the text content of a Dimension leaving the measured-distance numerical part in place rather than overriding completely, the measured-dimension portion will appear in the text as a pair of angle brackets <> , for instance:
(1 . "<> (VERIFY IN FIELD)")
FIND will be able to "see" the (VERIFY IN FIELD) part of that, but not the textual-conversion representation of the numerical distance that the <> are a place-holder for.
One reason it's appropriate that it not look for "text" content in the measured distance number is that how that "shows up" as displayed in the Dimension itself can vary depending on certain settings. For example, a distance of 14.5 as the raw numerical value [which is what is stored] will appear as 1'-2 1/2" in Architectural units, or as 15 in Decimal units if the Dimension Style is set to round to the nearest whole unit, or as 14 1/2 in Fractional units, and some of those variably if stacked fractions are involved.
You could put in a Product Feedback request to ask them to make it Find what you want in Dimensions. I have no idea how easy that would be, since it would have to treat Dimensions very differently from the way it treats all the other kinds of things. It would somehow have to compare the measured distance with the particulars of the Dimension Style's text settings and the possibility that even those can be overridden to represent the measured distance textually in a variety of ways, without an actual text-content override.
Kent Cooper, AIA