Bug Watch: December 2003

Txtexp torment 3 (2004 SP1a)

As promised last month, here's another problem with the troubled Txtexp Tool (Express / Text / Explode Text) -- it deletes the first letter of the exploded text! In some cases, it just deletes part of the text. This depends on what the first letter is. If the letter can be drawn with a single polyline, the whole letter goes away. If the text is made up of several strokes, only the first stroke vanishes. This bug is a symptom of a wider problem with exporting objects to a WMF file and then importing that file using the Express Tools LISP function (acet-wmfin), which is how the Textexp command works in the background. You can reproduce this by using the Wmfout command, selecting some lines, then importing the WMF file using (acet-wmfin "MyWMFName"). The last line you select will be lost.

Workaround: You can edit the text to insert a single-stroke letter (an S, perhaps) at the start, then use Textexp as usual. Alternatively, you can use Wmfout, Wmfin, and Explode to perform the text explosion. You will need to provide a scale factor of 2 in Wmfin and move the imported objects to the right spot manually.

SDI = Slip-up, Defect, Imperfection (2004 SP1a)

Submitted by Richard Littleton.

Remember the bad old days before AutoCAD 2000 introduced the ability to open more than one drawing at a time in a single AutoCAD session? Well, you can relive those times by setting the system variable SDI (Single Document Interface) to 1. When you open one drawing, another must close. Why on earth would anyone want to do that, you ask? Well, some people just prefer to work that way, and some third party applications, homemade batch processors, and other routines still require it. Even some Autodesk vertical products still require the use of single document mode.

The trouble is, setting SDI to 1 can break LISP, which means that a large number of things stop working, even if you don't do any LISP development yourself. To see this, set AutoCAD to not show a startup dialog box (Tools / Options