Tuesday, March 25, 2008

AutoCAD 2009 - Find and Replace

I love find and replace. I have used it many times to fix the mistakes that I insisted on copying, and pasting, and pasting, and pasting, and . . . . You get the point.

One of the beautiful things about digital design is that I can copy something over and over again, reducing the amount of time and work it takes to accomplish a task. That also means that whatever I copy has to be correct, or else it will be wrong all over my drawing! Find and Replace can help to fix this. AutoCAD 2009 has enhanced the F & R by providing more options to search with, and more filters to weed out what I don’t want. It will also automatically zoom to the entity we are replacing. That makes the process easier to review before you change it.

Start the Find and Replace command, (I type in FIND). Put some text in there to locate, select the MORE OPTIONS icon to bring up more options (what a concept!). Pick what you want to search through and go! The screen will automatically move to where the object is.
Yet another little thing enhanced to make designing better.

Happy CADDING!
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30 comments:

  1. Hello,
    Can you change zoom factor in find command?
    When I find some text and zoom to there is OK, but when I close find dialog ,zoomed text is out and I don't know where in my drawing this text is???

    In ACAD2008 is this OK ( with manual zoom)

    Thank for any help.
    Sorry for my English.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Boyan, Thank you for the question. In AutoCAD 2009, the find command zooms right to the text. It also displays a list of every instance that word has in the file you are searcing. it will tell you the numbers of times it is in the file, what tab (model, or a specific layout tab), and display some of the text that surrounds it.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Brian, thanks for your answer.

    I found all you wrote. But for my needs will be much better that when I
    close find dialog , zoomed text stay on the screen at the same zoom level as it was in find and replace zoom screen.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I have the same problem as boyan with the new FIND command in ACAD 2009. One used to be able to search for text (in 2008 and prior), click on ZOOM TO, find the instance of text for which one was searching, click on CLOSE and the view would stay focused on the word that was found. This was useful not just for finding and replacing words, but also for finding labeled objects that may not be blocks, or if the name of the block is not known. There seems to be no way to accomplish the same search functionality in '09.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I have searched and searched and can't find an answer either. It seems that the FIND is meant to only be a FIND/REPLACE. The ability to find and zoom to was great, I wish it wasn't gone. :(

    ReplyDelete
  6. Hi all, I'm so desperated (same like boyan). Did anyone have a Solution? :( Where the "Zoom to" :( :(

    ReplyDelete
  7. This is what I have found. Autodesk is aware of what they have done! They are planning on fixing it. the fix might come out in Service Pack One, or it might not come out until 2010 is released! I suspect that it will come out in a service pack, so keep your eyes open.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Hi Brian, & thanks. How about to edit textfind.arx, because I don't know how to edit ARX files. I'm trying to copy textfind.arx from Cad 2008 but it still not works :(. I hope SP1 immediately attend. Thanks again Brian.

    ReplyDelete
  9. I would be careful altering the ARX files. Make sure you back it up first. I don't know how to alter it, but it is an idea.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Since the Find command actually selects the text to prepare for an edit, you can simply zoom to the previous objet after closing the find dialog box. After finding the text you want and closing box. Hit "Z" enter "O" enter "P" enter.
    Your welcome from Cad-master Zack (UCI-CIA)

    ReplyDelete
  11. Even better! You can run this simple program utilizing Vlisp.

    (defun c:zo()
    (command "zoom" "object" "previous" ""))

    Mark "The Man" (UCI-CIA)

    ReplyDelete
  12. Thanks & Sorry, I have tried the way of like this, cannot work also?

    ReplyDelete
  13. My text its in the Block Properties FYI.

    ReplyDelete
  14. We've just upgraded Autocads in our office and not being able to zoom to found object is the first irritating thing we had. I hope they fix it. I don't know know why but "zoom/previous" solution didn't work either.

    ReplyDelete
  15. Here is another post that I had about this problem:
    http://cadablog.blogspot.com/2008/05/workaround-autocad-2009-findreplace-no.html

    Here is the short of it:
    Use the FIND command. Find your text. Zoom to it within the find command. Close the command

    Start the zoom command, Zoom Previous, and that will take you to your text. It's a lot of steps to take, but that's what works for now. Autodesk is going to issue some sort of fix in the future, but I don't know when.

    ReplyDelete
  16. I was able to get the 2008 "FIND" command in 2009 by copying these two files:

    textfind.arx
    textfindRes.dll

    from

    "C:\Program Files\AutoCAD 2008"
    to
    "C:\Program Files\AutoCAD 2009"

    I kept a backup copy of the originals in the folder and would suggest doing the same. Copy them while AutoCAD is not running, then start it after. I'd be interested in knowing if it works for anyone else.

    ReplyDelete
  17. Make that three files, sorry:

    achapi17.dbx

    Not sure what else it may cause, however. I just tried it.

    ReplyDelete
  18. The zoom previous thing doesn't work for me at all in either of its forms mentioned above. however, the file replacement technique suggested by sevak k works just fine, except it makes acad 09 unstable i also had to turn off both hyperlink search options otherwise it failed on the search straight away. Anyone else had these problems?

    ReplyDelete
  19. I don't recommend replacing the files. It causes to much trouble to get back one feature. Now, if you use th zoom to feature all day, then maybe it's worth it for you. Just make sure to keep a copy of the 2009 files so you can put them back if you need to.

    ReplyDelete
  20. Scott and Brian have a point. Replacing that third file (achapi17.dbx) creates instability, but if you swap just the first two it won't crash on you. However, with replacing only two files AutoCAD forces you into SDI mode after using the FIND command with a single drawing open. I generally keep multiple drawings open, and it is unable to switch to SDI. So, it's not a perfect workaround, but for me replacing just the first two files (textfind.arx and textfindRes.dll) and keeping multiple drawings open, I'm as good as 2008 now.

    ReplyDelete
  21. I have canned all of the above ideas. The zoom thign just deosn't work for me and the instability stuff just doesn't wash with me so i went looking elsewhere and found this. Its rugged but works very well. http://discussion.autodesk.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5890560 just download that guys lisp routine and it will do that job just fine until autodesk sort out their faux pas.

    ReplyDelete
  22. All autodesk need to do is making this FIND menu a Modeless Dialog
    so you can do ZOOM in/out while the FIND command is running.

    I wish they do the same thing with LAYER command and make it available to do ZOOM in/out and also PAN while Layer manu is on.

    Thanks,
    Afshin K.

    ReplyDelete
  23. Afshin, in AutoCAD 2009 the Layer Manager is now a pallet. That means that if you have it opened, you can still work in real time. When you make a change in the layer manager it is now instant. You don't have to close the Layer Manager to see the changes. Is that what you mean?

    ReplyDelete
  24. Does this update fix the problem ?:
    http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/item?siteID=123112&id=11581572&linkID=9240618
    I'll try when I get back to office tomorrow.

    ReplyDelete
  25. Yes, it isn't documented in the readme file, but SP1 does fix the Find/Zoom issue. Here is a link to a recent post I had discussing the Service Pack.

    http://cadablog.blogspot.com/2008/07/autocad-2009-service-pack-1-its-about.html

    ReplyDelete
  26. thanks Brian Benton,it does worked..

    sp1 have fixed the find issue,although the documentation on AutoDesk website doesn't mention this.

    ReplyDelete
  27. You would think that Autodesk would be all over this fix. It has been the most asked question on CAD-a-Blog about 2009. As you can see, this is the 27th comment on this topic.

    ReplyDelete
  28. Why do AutoCAD insist on changing the way things work when they already worked so well? It's only minor but Find / Replace it just another thing they broke for experienced users who have developed a muscle memory, and/or use more than 1 version of AutoCAD.

    They changed the tab-stops so if you tab from the "find" field you land in the "Find Where" field instead of the "Replace" field. Think - which do you change more often?

    They also messed up the workflow of doing the same change more than once. In older versions when you hit "Replace All" again it repeated the search. Now, when you hit "Replace All" a second time it just re-displays the results like some kind of proud but more than slightly stupid Nonce.

    AutoDesk - please user-test your changes on people who actually use the product. Don't make me log a bug for each keyboard shortcut you break - *again*.

    No, LISP & ARX workarounds are not a valid solution - we are not here to rewrite your software.

    ReplyDelete
  29. A related question that I haven't seen discussed anywhere--in 2009, when I do a "find" and zoom to a text string, it will rotate the actual Model space to show the text horizontally. In 2008, it would just rotate the text string so you could read it. I HATE how it changes the map rotation! Any suggestions on how to stop this annoyance?

    ReplyDelete
  30. CAD Bloke, I agree. If it aint broke don't fix it. Find/Replace worked great as it was. If you've added the 2009 patch (download it from Autodesk) it fixes some of the issues with the zooming, but I still like it better as it was pre 2009.
    Anonymous, I don't know if you can turn off the rotate, but I agree, it is annoying. Does anyone else know a solution?

    Oh, and yes CAD Bloke, writing code to fix a problem in AutoCAD is just stupid. Writing code to do your specific work more efficiently is why we have code.

    ReplyDelete

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