Phantom Yellow Rectangles

[Anonymous]

I have these phantom yellow rectangles on my CAD drawings. I have had them in all files I've ever used and just learned to ignore them but I can't anymore. They only appear at certain zoom levels (scale.) They are not selectable and are seemingly random. Anyone else know what these are? And how to get rid of them?

Any help is appreciated,

Trent

[wispoxy]

Please share a DWG sample.

[Anonymous]

Unfortunately I can't share the DWG files because they're confidential. But I've had them at previous jobs also, in other words completely unrelated drawings and versions of AutoCAD to the one's I use now.

I've also had them print on PDFs as a series of close together vertical lines. However then never showed on the PDF in the Adobe PDF viewer, just on the paper when they printed. I don't know if it's related. However, a bunch of close together vertical lines zoomed out in AutoCAD would appear as a solid rectangle.

Trent

[wispoxy]

If you create a new cad file to share with us, will they be there?

[leothebuilder]

Empty text objects maybe? Just guessing here.

[Anonymous]

No they won't but I deleted all the content and they're still there. Attached.

What's strange is I did Ctrl+A and then delete and they went away but if I deleted everything in pieces they didn't go away and then Ctrl+A didn't do anything after that. My guess was they were somehow attached to something with text...

Trent

[Patchy · Accepted solution]

Yes, they are empty text.

[Anonymous]

Awesome! How do I delete them?

[Patchy · Accepted solution]

Use the autolisp:

http://forums.augi.com/showthread.php?72018-BLANK-TEXTS-amp-ZERO-LENGTH-LINES

[drjohn]

Try QTEXT ... turn it on and they should be bounding boxes and you should be able to delete them.

HTH

Regards,

DJ

[Kent1Cooper]

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@Patchy wrote:

Yes, they are empty text.

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I have to convert to an earlier version here, so I hope that doesn't affect it, but....  For me, the yellow ones are in anonymous Blocks, and there are also some white ones that are top-level Text objects.

But in neither case are they empty.  They contain spaces [multiple in the yellow ones, single in some of the white ones and multiple in others].  That's why they appear when Zoomed out, but not when Zoomed in closer -- at a certainly Zoomed-out level relative to the Text size, Text turns into little approximation bars [what you're seeing], but when Zoomed in closer, they show their character content, which in the case of nothing but spaces means they disappear.  They also look empty in the result of a LIST command, but if you pick on one and check in the Properties box, you can "detect" the space(s) by double-clicking in the Content slot.

Because they're not really empty, the AUGI thread may be irrelevant [though I didn't follow it all the way through].

A routine could certainly be made to find all Text objects containing nothing but spaces, and get rid of them.  The ones in the Blocks are a different matter, but might be findable, especially if they are always in anonymous Blocks, or Blocks of the same name, or on the same Layer, or something.  But if that's all that's in those Blocks, presumably you want the Blocks themselves removed, rather than just the Text objects in them, which could probably also be done, though it would be a little more complicated.

[JDMather]

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@Anonymous wrote:
 I have had them in all files I've ever used

 But I've had them at previous jobs also, in other words completely unrelated drawings and versions of AutoCAD to the one's I use now.

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Now that you know the cause - eliminate the source.

[wispoxy]

@Patchy You're awesome.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

The way I did it and got it to work was from the AUGI thread. I did Ctrl+A and then deselected all the content using the mouse to draw a box from right to left while holding shift. It took a while to load because the tens of thousands of objects to deselect but the empty text fields were what was left selected. Then I just hit DELETE. Then I had to do the same inside any blocks that had them also by going into the block editor. The AutoLisp from the thread didn't work but theoretically would get rid of zero length lines if you had any.

Trent

[jggerth]

drjohn had the right solution to quckly identify blank text strings.... use the QTEXT command, and they will be visible/selectable.

[Anonymous]

That had no effect for me. Even trying it on the CAD file I attached in an early post.

Trent

[dbroad]

Unless you have a really old version of AutoCAD, the easiest way to get rid of empty text strings is to purge them.  Check the purge 0 length geometry and empty text objects.  It will purge any string that has only blanks.

[Anonymous]

That did work to get rid of some white lines (that are zero length or empty text fields) that appeared when zoomed out to extreme scale but it had no effect on the yellow rectangles.

After further research, it turns out the yellow rectangles are actually "Block reference"s. But the solution I stated earlier still is the only way to get rid of them. The can not be individually selected by conventional means. But Ctrl+A works to select them all at once.

Trent

[dbroad]

I just looked at your drawing.  The blocks, which contain only an empty text string are all anonymous.  You should look into what is creating those in the first place.  Since anonymous blocks cannot be edited, they are virtually useless, except as placeholders for dynamic blocks.  These are not dynamic blocks.

CTRL+A is not the best way to select something specific.  Qselect is better.  Choose block for object type. Choose Name from the properties list and then choose wildcard match.  In the blank, enter *U*.

That will select all anonymous blocks and skip dynamic blocks.

[Anonymous]

Well either way, after much testing these are the results (attached screenshots using the CAD file previously attached):

1. Ctrl+A: Selects all things and then all of the empty block references and text fields can be deleted at once (except for the ones inside blocks, of which the same thing needs to be done inside the block editor.)

2. Ctrl+A_after_Purge: The PURGE process (explained earlier) only gets rid of empty text fields.

3. QSELECT: Only selects some of the empty block references and not all of them, as you stated.

4. QTEXT set to "ON" didn't allow them to be selectable.

In the end, I don't have the time or energy in this situation to try and figure out why some empty block references are different than others or what the full extents of the commands PURGE, QSELECT, and QTEXT are but for me option 1 was what I needed to fix my probem.

However, thank you all very much for your help on solving this!

Trent