Topic Title

I hope you all will bear with me as I attempt to get my ducks in a row for things I've long neglected and, in the process, asking a lot of questions, as well as sometimes unnecessarily recreating the wheel.

I'm currently creating symbols for drawing bugs, etc., with placeholder numbers/letters so that I can easily place the bug and then edit the placeholders. (Does that exist somewhere that I can merely grab/download rather than create? The standard drawing symbols in DataCad, as far as I can tell, don't have text in them. But I can't be the first one wanting to do this.)

I've figured out how to group the lines in the symbol-to-be and then place the text, and then save the symbol. That way, with Explode on when placing the symbol, I can edit the placeholder text. What I can't do is delete the whole symbol as a group when needed. I'd have to delete the grouped lines and then separately delete the placeholder text parts.

What am I missing in this process? Or, as I mentioned earlier, do these symbols already exist somewhere?

Thanks, as always, to you gurus.

David,

This is something that DataCAD can do in a symbol without exploding it - it is called a Text Attribute.

When you draw the symbol, and the text - in the regular Text menu at the S9 button at the bottom, select Attribute. This brings up a dialog box:

The Attribute Name is what you see in the symbol if you do not type anything in when you place the symbol.

The Prompt is the question that pops up when you place the symbol.

Then you can save this as you would any other symbol. When you place the symbol - you get a popup that asks you the (first) prompt. If you type something then, that gets shown in that symbol only. If you don't type anything at the time you insert the symbol, by just hitting enter, you see the Attribute Name as a place holder.

You can then later edit the attribute either with Change/Text/Contents or you can use the extended character code to edit the attributes of a series of symbols one after the other. Here's my MCR shortcut that uses the Alt-U keyboard shortcut - change the U to the letter/character of your choice:

Code: Select allU^170#^$^
//Edit Symbol Text Attributes repeatedly

You can have multiple attributes in a symbol.

Thanks Neil. It's beginning (albeit slowly) to sound familiar. I didn't realize/recall that it was the Attribute function. With that, I found the area in the manual. I'll need to play around with it as it sounds a bit intense, with several possible sequences of steps.

Do you group it before saving the symbol? If so, before or after entering the text? I know that if you group it after, the text isn't editable, but that was when I created the text without using the Attribute function.

I'm still wondering if someone has already creating these symbols since they must be pretty commonly needed. I have most of the old CheapTricks disks, which I've perused but not found anything.

After I get this under control, I need to understand Symbol Scale vs Symbol Scale by Folder. I haven't been able (so far) to find that in the manual.

David

Sometimes if the info is not in the manual yet, you should be able to find some info in the "What's New" and/or the "Revision History" links from the Help tab.

Thanks Neil. It's beginning (albeit slowly) to sound familiar. I didn't realize/recall that it was the Attribute function. With that, I found the area in the manual. I'll need to play around with it as it sounds a bit intense, with several possible sequences of steps.

Do you group it before saving the symbol? If so, before or after entering the text? I know that if you group it after, the text isn't editable, but that was when I created the text without using the Attribute function.

I'm still wondering if someone has already creating these symbols since they must be pretty commonly needed. I have most of the old CheapTricks disks, which I've perused but not found anything.

After I get this under control, I need to understand Symbol Scale vs Symbol Scale by Folder. I haven't been able (so far) to find that in the manual.

David

You can add the Text Attributes when you first create a symbol, or add them afterward in the Symbol Editor. They sound more complicated then they are - they are essentially a text placeholder in the symbol. When you place the symbol (unexploded) the query/question you see is asking for the "value" i.e. what text you want to appear in that instance of the symbol.

And you can edit this "value"/text later on, after you place a the symbol, as well.