Import specs into AutoCad?

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Author Message Robert E. Woodburn Senior Member Username: bwoodburn Post Number: 124 Registered: 01-2005 Posted on Tuesday, August 01, 2006 - 10:54 am:    Of all the ways to import text into AutoCad, is there one that is best suited for "specs on drawings"? We have a standard limited-application spec in MS Word that would fill four 22" x 34" sheets, 6 columns per sheet. We would like to preserve the Word doc formatting (17 pt. TrueType "Arial Narrow" upper & lower case) since its lower-case x-height is about 1/8", which we consider a minimum (1/16" at 11" x 17" half-size). Upper & lower case is used for legibility, Arial Narrow for compactness. AutoCad seems to want to re-format the text in its own choice of character style, height, width, spacing etc., thwarting the intent. Editing ability in AutoCad might be a nice bonus, but is not essential, since that could be done in Word, before importation. Suggestions, anyone? Success stories? Pitfalls to avoid? Thanks! Ralph Liebing, RA, CSI Senior Member Username: rliebing Post Number: 431 Registered: 02-2003 Posted on Tuesday, August 01, 2006 - 11:19 am:    No magic process here. Did some of this yesterday, and used same font and size as you note; found that we had some relatively minor spacing and formatting problems. Text that wraps would not align to left margin; some spacing on same line of text would crowd up, etc. Did not experience any AutoCad effort to change style, height, etc. All easily fixed. We know of no cure for this. John Guill AIA, CSI, CCS, CCCA, SCIPa Senior Member Username: johng Post Number: 30 Registered: 07-2005 Posted on Tuesday, August 01, 2006 - 03:27 pm:    Robert: I am no ACAD whiz, so don't laugh too hard. There are two kinds of ACAD text, dtext and mtext. I can't remember which is which, but one is an expandable text box, (mtext I think). Create an Mtext box and stretch it out to suit the dimension of your drawing extent. Format the text in Word the way you want it, then copy the text out of Word and paste it into the mtext box in ACAD. The formatting should survive into ACAD if the font is available to ACAD. The ACAD editor window has some limited formatting abilities. To get the alignments to work, select all the text and tweak the ruler (sim to Word) until it all lines up. You can get hanging indents and similar effects, but you may have to fiddle with it. Word wrap also works, and individual character formatting (bold, italic etc.) If the text style problem persists, you may have to create a custom text format in ACAD, which is just beyond my grasp. If you like, I can ask my job captain here, because he did it for me. Regards JG Phil Kabza Senior Member Username: phil_kabza Post Number: 193 Registered: 12-2002 Posted on Tuesday, August 01, 2006 - 10:40 pm:    I've tried on several occasions in several firms to work out a reasonable way to routinely accomplish moving text material from MSWord files to AutoCAD drawings. I always gave up. There's a fascination on the part of some architects with putting specifications on drawings. By the time they are reduced to the size necessary for this to be a reasonable undertaking, they serve little purpose. I've just stuck with issuing a modest little booklet that gets stapled into the drawing binding. Or better: stayed all electronic and issued a bookmarked PDF file. Tracy Van Niel Senior Member Username: tracy_van_niel Post Number: 184 Registered: 04-2002 Posted on Wednesday, August 02, 2006 - 09:02 am:    The easiest way we have found to do this is to save the file as a .txt file (I'm talking Word here, don't know if the same applies to WordPerfect or not). From what I understand from the project architects here that have had to get the spec onto the drawings, getting text from a .txt file into the CADD file is a lot easier than trying to add text from a Word file. So I will create the condensed spec as a Word file, then save it as a .txt file. The spec directory for that project will contain both. The problem with .txt files is that it removes all formatting so you lose indents, etc. Don Harris CSI, CCS, CCCA, AIA Senior Member Username: don_harris Post Number: 79 Registered: 03-2003 Posted on Wednesday, August 02, 2006 - 09:42 am:    Tried a little experiment. Can't say it was 100% sucessful, but it seems to have some potential if some quirks can be worked out. I converted our standard drawing sheet complete with title blocks to a pdf file. I took some sheet specs (.doc files) that I did and copy and pasted. It basically worked, but... the text always came in as a text box that needed additional manipulation, and any outlining format all went left justified. I also tried .txt files getting similar results. While I can't say this was completely successful, I can say that I inserted large quanties of text in a very short time, much shorter than it would take trying to manipulate text with ACAD. Certainly worth a little more experimenting. Richard A. Rosen, CSI, CCS, AIA (Unregistered Guest) Unregistered guest Posted on Wednesday, August 02, 2006 - 10:26 am:    Has anyone talked to your office IT person or cad manager (assuming your office has one or the other) about add-on programs for importing Word and Excel documents into Autocad? I have started looking into this since our residential clients insist on specs on drawings and some AHJ (who shall remain nameless) will not accept "book specs" since "they are not construction documents". The promise of these add-ons is that they do not limit the size of the document which can be imported as Autocad does, they retain formating, and the link to the original document for editing purposes. Try Googling "import Word into Autocad" and see what is available. I have ordered some trial packages and will be testing them over the next several weeks. I will try to post reviews if you all think that is appropriate. Anonymous   Posted on Wednesday, August 02, 2006 - 11:11 am:    Maybe we should take up a collection and buy him a PRM? Wayne Yancey Senior Member Username: wyancey Post Number: 154 Registered: 05-2005 Posted on Wednesday, August 02, 2006 - 11:12 am:    Robert, I use MTEXT as described by John Guill. I copy/paste the MSWord text into an MTEXT box and perform some minor formatting tweaks. Create a text style on AutoCAD that results in 1/8" high text. Some formating will be lost from the original but indenting, hanging indents, paragraph numbering, right justified are possible with MTEXT plus much more (underlining, bold text, obloque, etc). Create the text in model space as a standalone *.dwg file. Either create a viewprot in paperspace in same dwg file or xref the text into paperspace in a separate dwg file. I use the outline spec page format for specs on drawings, concentrating on Part 2 stuff. Phil, For assessment and rehab projects submitted to the Seattle Department of Planning and Design, they want specs on drawings for the exterior building enclosure products as part of an over the counter subject to field inspection building permit. Wayne Marc C Chavez Senior Member Username: mchavez Post Number: 163 Registered: 07-2002 Posted on Wednesday, August 02, 2006 - 01:41 pm:    I guess I'm not getting something here Open AutoCAD Open Word highlight selection in Word - Copy switch to AutoCAD - Paste All formating etc. is fine Now one caution; this inserts only one "page" (about 12 inches max) at a time. Scale Can be an Issue and plotting is different than printing but the object is scalable. The OLE object is now EMBEDDED in Autocad and no longer has any separate existance. for Excel We still use Spanner eventually we'll just embed excel directly. Richard A. Rosen, CSI, CCS, AIA New member Username: rarosen Post Number: 1 Registered: 08-2006 Posted on Wednesday, August 02, 2006 - 04:00 pm:    Marc: The procedure you noted is what everyone seems to have the problem with. The OLE placement of Word or Excel documents is limited by the size of information it can import (copy and paste?) into the Autocad file. It works fine for small blocks of notes or text but is a source of constant frustration for anyone trying to put together a few sheets of specs on the drawings or door schedules that are longer then 20 lines in excel. Marc C Chavez Senior Member Username: mchavez Post Number: 164 Registered: 07-2002 Posted on Wednesday, August 02, 2006 - 04:44 pm:    I agree. What I do is divide the spec into page length chunks. This works well except for the ends of columns when I have to cut and paste awkwardly to get even columns of information. AutoCAD was just NOT made for this. I will be generating a “sheet” title-block et al in In-Design (the replacement for PageMaker) this program WILL wrap a “story” from column to column and the titleblock is a picture imported into the page. As my dad said as he smacked me over the head with the wrench. “Don’t use a wrench as a hammer.” ;) I talked to our AutoCAD provider and He directed me to the following website: http://www.dotsoft.com/word2cad.htm This product looks interesting (they have an excel product too) to Quote their site: OLE has it's limitations, Word2CAD doesn't • OLE Size is limited to 'a single page'. • Plotting problems which OLE appears 'grainy', 'fuzzy', etc. • If the drawing is plotted rotated, the OLE does not. • OLE Objects can 'bleed through' multiple layouts, showing up in places where they don't belong. • Recipients of your drawings on other CAD systems may have problems with the OLE representation. Even the latest AutoCAD's Mtext Import has problems. It's limited to 16-32k (depending on the AutoCAD version), doesn't handle table text correctly, and its not linked! Robert E. Woodburn Senior Member Username: bwoodburn Post Number: 125 Registered: 01-2005 Posted on Wednesday, August 02, 2006 - 05:15 pm:    Thanks, everyone, for your help. That word2cad add-on program looks interesting. Main advantage is that it will wrap from column to column. (Now if we could just get it to wrap from page to page--er, sheet to sheet...) Anyone have any experience with word2cad? I'm trying to get the u&lc text into AutoCad with a 0.8 line height, which apparently will work if you set the line spacing at 0.8 while you're setting up the mtext box (i.e., between the box's first and second point picks). Wayne Yancey Senior Member Username: wyancey Post Number: 156 Registered: 05-2005 Posted on Wednesday, August 02, 2006 - 06:57 pm:    Mark, I do not have difficulty when I copy/paste MSword documents into MTEXT in AutoCAD. My MSword source files use 11 point New Times Roman font. I copy from normal view. I do not recall being restricted to one page at a time but this restriction is of no consequence to me. The outline style specs used for DPD STFI building permits ususally are shortened to 1 or 2 pages. DPD wants materials, not the contents of Parts 1 and 3. In an AutoCAD MTEXT dialog box I change the font to TrueType Arial font, 1/8" height, 0.85 scale factor. I highlight the text with the cursor. All that said, large text dwg files do slow down AutoCAD somewhat but not enough to go for a coffee break or rotate the tires. Wayne Phil Kabza Senior Member Username: phil_kabza Post Number: 194 Registered: 12-2002 Posted on Wednesday, August 02, 2006 - 10:01 pm:    Wayne, Interesting note you added above regarding AHJs dictating non-standard architectural practices for the convenience of their reviewers. This topic popped up in another thread recently. It also comes up pretty regularly after a few beers among firm specifiers. It generally annoys me. We'd be better served by partnering with our AHJ colleagues and helping them get their CDTs and stop being afraid of written specifications. But certain Project Managers can also make extensive arguments for trying to put masses of text onto 30 by 42 inch sheets of paper. They just never convince me that the electronic gymnastics required to do it result in a useful representation of information. I just find the whole idea of written specifications on drawing sheets unnecessary and irritating. By the time you distill written specifications down to a size that makes this feasible, you have very little left. Marc C Chavez Senior Member Username: mchavez Post Number: 165 Registered: 07-2002 Posted on Thursday, August 03, 2006 - 10:49 am:    As a matter of fact, one of my architects decided that the 81/2 x 11 version (booklet) was better for all than the sheet version. However, much as I would like "Real" project manuals, having that stupid, generalized, barely enough information, “sheet spec” on the drawings has meant the difference between something and nothing. We have many small projects and the “little darlings” would send the drawings out sans spec if I did not have something that was “easy” for them to include. The Interiors department (small medical TI’s) was ecstatic! I’m still explaining to my wife that all the flowers are business related. Before retirement I hope to convert the heathen but until then I’ll just try to get them to show up to mass and kneel at the right time. Phil Kabza Senior Member Username: phil_kabza Post Number: 195 Registered: 12-2002 Posted on Thursday, August 03, 2006 - 11:09 am:    Mark, Having recently left an office that was issuing developer midrise projects in the $10M and up range with no written specifications, I fully support your argument for gradual conversion of the heathen. We'll keep them in our thoughts and prayers. John Bunzick, CCS, CCCA Senior Member Username: bunzick Post Number: 559 Registered: 03-2002 Posted on Thursday, August 03, 2006 - 11:53 am:    $10M with no specs? When that starts happening here, I'm retiring for sure. Vivian Volz, RA, CSI, CCS Senior Member Username: vivianvolz Post Number: 71 Registered: 06-2004 Posted on Wednesday, August 09, 2006 - 02:22 pm:    We do the MText thing fairly often in some of our offices. We don't use OLE or any other translation from Word to CAD. I paste individual sections into individual MText entities, usually a direct cut-and-paste. In AutoCAD 2004 through 2006, the indentations and numbering are preserved, though in 2004 the indents get a little screwy sometimes. You can fix them in AutoCAD. (You, or your favorite CAD guru, that is. In fact, lately I do the editing in Word and let the CAD folks paste the text in.) In some cases it works better to save the Word doc as an rtf. Don't save as txt! you lose the formatting! But rtf's can be imported into MText by right-clicking inside the MText editor. I looked at Word2CAD with one of my IT gurus recently, and also at ARCOM's beta version of a sheet notes application. I didn't like either one: Word2CAD forces you to either keep the Word doc linked live to the drawing or to explode it into individual lines of text. There's no in-between. And the ARCOM software concatenates all the Word files and creates one MText entity per column. Neither facilitates small edits within AutoCAD. Our workstyle is to let the architects/designers have the CAD files as their own domain once the specifiers hand over the text, so we don't like to cripple them if they want to make small corrections to (gasp) coordinate the drawings and the specs. We ended up inventing a rather cool way to avoid using either. We line up the MText entities all in a single vertical column in modelspace, with guidelines that correspond to the height of a column. Then, in paperspace, we make as many viewports as there are columns, and direct each one to look at a different (sequential) segment of the modelspace column. Then, if a section breaks across a column, you don't have to break the MText entity into two; just add a carriage return to get the text not to step right on the dividing line. It's very user friendly if you need to add or delete a section at the last minute, too. If I'm speaking AutoCAD gobbledygook, please show this paragraph to your CAD guru. We have very strict rules for when to use sheet specs, which in our firm are severely abbreviated from their book-spec counterparts. Negotiated GC, no risky assemblies, and the client, architect the GC trust each other. In other words, a project for which the project manager might be tempted not to have a spec at all, if we didn't let them have sheet specs. Robert, you've gotten a million different answers in the last week. Did we help? ;-) Robert E. Woodburn Senior Member Username: bwoodburn Post Number: 129 Registered: 01-2005 Posted on Wednesday, August 09, 2006 - 02:55 pm:    Yes, Vivian. In fact, before I got to the fourth paragraph of your post I read the third one out loud to our office cad guru (who just happens to sit in the adjacent cubicle). He countered that AutoCad seems to have difficulty dealing with large amounts of text (e.g., a few dozen pages), perhaps due to buffer limitations. (Then, when I asked him if we could at least try this approach, his immediate response was, "Not on my project!") I may explore this with others on other projects -- like your firm, we intend to use this for limited purposes -- tenant lease space improvement work only. I haven't responded to each post with thanks, so as not to clutter it up, but I appreciate all the input from everyone. I put this effort on hold while this discussion is ongoing. I considered getting Word2Cad for a while, but am rethinking that. I want to try this first... I appreciate everyone's contributions to this thread. Thank you all! Vivian Volz, RA, CSI, CCS Senior Member Username: vivianvolz Post Number: 72 Registered: 06-2004 Posted on Wednesday, August 09, 2006 - 03:04 pm:    Thanks, Robert! I haven't tried a dozen pages. The most I've tried to put in so far is a full-length millwork spec with plastic laminate cabinets and countertops and veneer panels. I believe it truncated the text, but that didn't matter because I was still using our old format, in which I had to break the MText by column. That spec took up three columns on a 30 x 42 sheet at 1/8" high text. Not recommended for sheet specs, typically. I think the worst-case scenario for buffer overload is just that the text gets truncated and you have to start a new MText entity. Glad we could help! Vivian Robert E. Woodburn Senior Member Username: bwoodburn Post Number: 130 Registered: 01-2005 Posted on Wednesday, August 09, 2006 - 03:56 pm:    Vivian, it sounds as if your method lets text wrap column to column, except sometimes extra returns have to be added when it wraps on a line. If each viewport were a line or two longer than the distance between guidelines in the modelspace column, would that avoid the carriage return at the break? Thanks. Vivian Volz, RA, CSI, CCS Senior Member Username: vivianvolz Post Number: 73 Registered: 06-2004 Posted on Wednesday, August 09, 2006 - 04:28 pm:    Robert, that's an interesting idea, and I'll experiment with it; but I suspect that it will cause the line on the bottom of column 1 to repeat on the top of column 2. We wouldn't want wouldn't want that! :-D Chris Grimm, CSI, CCS, MAI, RLA Senior Member Username: tsugaguy Post Number: 37 Registered: 06-2005 Posted on Monday, August 14, 2006 - 11:14 pm:    The pen is mightier than the sword. Or the keystroke mightier than the mouse/trackball...? I have recently seen someone note drawings with the manufacturer and product name of asphalt shingles, and then they needed to hunt it down on every sheet it was used on when they changed products. With one swift stroke we can change the shingles spec'd on 10 drawing sheets, provided that those sheets properly use a generic term "asphalt shingles" or 07311. The point of diminishing returns comes very quickly when one attempts to put specs on drawings for the convenience of those who don't want to read. Actually by then it has already happened. If you must do it, perhaps you could make a Word or WordPerfect document of the prescribed sheet size and use the tool that is made for as much text as you care to put on a sheet, and all the columns and formatting you want...? John Bunzick, CCS, CCCA Senior Member Username: bunzick Post Number: 566 Registered: 03-2002 Posted on Tuesday, August 15, 2006 - 08:44 am:    I just experimented with Word enough to think it's possible to do this in Word, though I have not verified it. I have sent Word files to a plotter before, using scaling (Word limits to a maximum 22 inch dimension for paper size) to fill a drawing sheet. I think it would be possible using the borders tool as well as drawing tools to create the title block, though this could take some finagling. However, once that's done and saved as a template you have all the power of Word to create your spec sheets, and the specifier can take back control (that is, assuming they want it). (Some day I will try this, but it will have to wait a month or two due to schedules and vacation.)