This procedure will walk through the process of creating your own text linetypes, utilizing the capability introduced with AutoCAD R13. You might be surprised at how much you can do with this simple customization, especially when combined with the Windows Wingding Truetype font.

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Users often want to add miscellaneous lisp routines to their system, having them automatically loaded and available at all times. The intentions of this procedure is to allow the customization to survive a reinstallation or upgrade of AutoCAD.

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We have reached a fork in the road on our Civil/Survey and Mapping add-ons.  For years we attempted to provide one package that ran inside plain CAD engines as well as Civil3D while using the best objects available.   The problem is that it meant a weaker (than possible) Civil3D connection, prevented us from adding tools only (currently) possible in Civil3D and created confusion on what parts used Civil3D objects.

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We are occasionally asked why our products don’t directly import point ascii files.

Keep in mind that TXT/ASC files can contain anything (even the paragraphs of this post content) so we process it differently.  We have a Point > File > Convert Text which handles any text file, regardless of the delimiter.  It lets you preview the content, specify the delimiter and column order then parse the results into a defined point format.

If your ascii files are P,N,E,Z,D you can simply change the extension to .AUF and the program would read the files directly.

Recent versions of AutoCAD change the default behavior of newly created Mtext objects.  After creation you can’t change the Width in the Properties dialog!  Users often want to set the width to 0.0.

For existing Mtext objects, change the Columns setting (just below the width) to “No Columns”.  You will have to commit this change by pressing ESC, then reselect the Mtext to be able to change the width.

To restore previous behavior for all newly created Mtext, change the MTEXTCOLUMN to 0 in your current (and prototype) drawing.