Andy, When I sent that email I was fairly confused about the DXF format and my searches didn't find enough to explain it to me. Lee Harding produced a link to his company site that didn't help much to start with either (probably my fault) but then I found the Visual Basic program example and it said that all the data was in pairs! That was the key bit of data I needed! It ought to have been written in big bold letters at the start of the various documents I found describing the file format but maybe the writers assume I knew that. It might have been there somewhere but it didn't jump out and grab me before then! Now it should be very simple for me to write a routine to find the text. Given the number of files involved it probably would be nice to write something that was efficient though even that isn't essential. I figure I will do a search for 5 character strings and then test for numbers. The numbers will be between 10001 and 14000 so I should not end up with many false hits even if I don't check for location of the text on the drawing. The location might be a problem anyway as the drawings have different areas. I produced most of these drawings and I cannot see why there be any number in this range used for anything but our part numbers and I can live with less than perfect data, anything is better than what I have now. Thanks for all of your help. I may make a start on this on the weekend. I will let you know how I go. David At 09:06 25/07/2003, you wrote: >David, > >Sorry about the e-mail block. Use buyer242299@xxxxxxx if you want to write >to me direct. > >As I am sure you have discovered in your research, the dxf file can be though >of as >a key list (in lisp it is called an association list). For instance in text >entities code 10 is associated with a real number that represents an x >coordinate, 20 is a Y coordinate and 30 is a Z coordinate. Code 8 >typically refers >to the layer the entity is on, and as you may have guessed code 1 refers >to the >actual text. DXF codes can have different meanings depending on what entity >they are associated with, but as you play with them you will notice a certain >consistency between various entities. The coordinates are relative to the >point 0,0,0 which can be located anywhere in your drawing. > >The puzzle that you need to solve about finding the text in the DXF file is >the same one that would need to be solved if someone (maybe me) were to write >you a program to extract this data. I was really hoping that the text you >were >looking for was a block attribute or at least had some distinctive sequence >of characters that could be searched for. The insertion points (code >10,20,30) >in the two examples you sent were wildly different, so I doubt finding all >text between certain coordinate bounds will work. Your best bet may be to >search for all code 1 entities that have 5 and only 5 characters. This >should >return everything you need and at worst it will return some spurious >values that >will just need to be deleted. > >Andy