Most of us appreciate the intelligence of AutoCAD text. It behaves as text should, enabling you to edit notes and numbered lists as you would in a typical text editor. But, occasionally, you may have the need for text that’s just dumb old graphics (lines, arcs, and circles). For example, maybe you want to draw a creative company logo to insert on your title block or to imprint onto a 3D part. You could, of course, draw all the lines and curves manually. But… Yikes! That would be a true test of your endurance and determination!
As a savvy AutoCAD user, your first thought, like mine, may be to use the EXPLODE command to dumb down the text. Great idea! But AutoCAD doesn’t want to dumb down your intelligent text and will tell you the selected text object can’t be exploded.
Express Tools to the rescue! From the Express Tools menu (only available in AutoCAD, not LT), expand the Modify Text flyout and select Explode. This launches the TXTEXP command which is different from the typical AutoCAD EXPLODE command.
It allows you to explode text objects into geometry. Yay! You did NOT want to draw all those line and arc segments manually!!!
Tip: After using TXTEXP to convert the text to geometry, some of the geometry may be polylines (open and/or closed). For maximum editing flexibility you may want to select all the geometry and explode it again, this time using the plain old EXPLODE command. Doing so will convert all the geometry to segments (lines and arcs).
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