David, I also have a program that uses the OD libraries which may help you. It is primarily a drawing viewer, but we have added some batch capabilities to it. I am not sure what text you need to extract, but you could use my program to convert all 5000 dwg files (in one batch) into dxf files which could then be searched using any one of a variety of tools for the strings that you need. It is not exactly what you are looking for but this solution does at least use off the shelf programs. If you are interested the link below will take you to the project home page: http://lx-viewer.sourceforge.net/ Andy