Create a list of all the texts inside a drawing

[Anonymous]

Hi,

I was asked to create a list with all the components that exist in all the drawings in our project wich is taking forever to accomplish manually, the list should consist of all the Tags that are added as single/double texts in the drawings.... is there a way to create such a list with autocad?

The drawings are available in DWG and PDF formats..

all suggestions are welcome 

Thanks in advance 

Jonas K.

[pendean · Accepted solution]

Automation requires preplanning.

Those "components" need to be blocks, text associated with them need to be attributes objects (not plain text) inside those blocks. Once all of that is in place, you can automate what you want using ATTEXT command.
Here is an easy to follow tutorial https://www.cad-notes.com/how-to-extract-block-attributes-in-autocad-lt/

HTH

[steven-g]

Can you show us an example of what you have and what you need to produce?

[Anonymous]

Hello Steven,

Thank you for replying, I could unfortunetaly not post any data from the drawings's content but the type of drawings that I'm working with is P&ID drawings that consist of tenths of components such as valves, fans, motors and coolers and each and every component has a special tag which refers to what it's called in reality, those tags where placed in the drawings as single/double Text items and not as attribute in a block which I have to collect now and create a list with.. hope that theese informations were enough  🙂

[Anonymous]

Thank  you for the valuable information Pendean, this was really helpful.

[steven-g]

Which version of AutoCAD do you use 'dtext' and 'text' have produced just text since about 2000 apparently, the only option I could think of would be to use the 'list' command, by selecting the text items either by mouse clicking or by some selection method (qselect, selectsimilar, etc)

The list command will send a copy of the properties to the command line history where you can copy that information and then paste it into excel. And in excel using filters will let you quickly find just the text content for each item.

How useful that would be to you depends on whether you do though just need to list all the text items or whether you also need other information to go with that text.

You can get the text values out of AutoCAD using this method in a matter of minutes but it does take some setting up and trying to describe the process without knowing how you need the results, or indeed how the text is laid out is difficult. 'Text' covering multiple lines is still seen as separate items by AutoCAD.

Try selecting a couple of text items and run the 'list' command then press F2 to see the command history see if this gives you the sort of information you can use.