Michael’s Corner

Michael's Corner is a monthly publication written by Michael E. Beall, Autodesk Authorized Author and peripatetic AutoCAD trainer. Michael travels all over the USA, bringing his fantastic experience and great understanding of AutoCAD to his clients. Michael's Corner brings together many of the tips, tricks and methods developed during these training sessions for the benefit of all users.

Michael's Corner provides something for every AutoCAD user. Every month, a number of articles cover a wide range of topics, suitable for users at all levels, including "The Basics" for those just starting out. Essentially, the aim of Michael's Corner is to help all AutoCAD users work smarter and faster.

This month…

From the Vault

Originally published February 2005

Qtext for Mystery Dots

Have you ever clicked on the Model Space tab, then did a Zoom Extents… and the drawing is gone? You probably have "floaters" or those mystery dots that hang out on the periphery of the screen; one on the top or left and the other(s) at the bottom or on the right. One of them is actually your drawing, the rest of them have been flung to the far reaches of who knows where.

Possible Reasons for Why…

The basepoint of a block was not specified. When creating a block in that drawing, the basepoint may have been left at 0,0, rather than specified on a more useful location. Most of the mystery dots I encounter turn out to be blocks with or without attributes.

No-text text. Another guilty party is the piece of text that somehow contains only a space.

Right-click when moving or copying an object. It may occasionally happen that when moving or copying an object, instead of left-clicking to pick the second point of displacement, a user may inadvertently right-click. This causes the default <use first point as displacement> option to be used, shooting your object off in an upper-right direction. Essentially, this option takes the coordinates of the base point and doubles them. So, if your basepoint is at 1000,1000, the moved object will end up near 2000,2000 and possibly way off screen.

How To Find the Dots…

When searching for objects that can't be seen, you usually zoom out a bit, then start windowing areas in an effort to display the grips of the objects on the edge. Two things that will help in that effort:

1. In Options, at the bottom of the Selection tab, change the setting for the grip Object Selection Limit to some big number, otherwise, if you do window a bunch of stuff, the grips won't display.
2. Set the variable QTEXT to <On>, then regenerate the drawing. This variable goes way back to the days of 286 computers when drawings containing lots of text would regen very slowly, especially if you had a complex font. The Qtext variable displays all text objects - dtext, mtext, attribute text, and dimension text - as a box. With the Qtext variable On, you may now be able to see text objects that have no text.

Once you have found those objects on the edge, use the Move command and move them a closer to the other dots. At least this way, when you do a Zoom Extents, you'll be able to see the objects.

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