TSR - Text and MText Search & Replace

TSR is focused exclusively on Text and Mtext. The TSR menu is the simplest of all the PET menus, with 10 Search choices and 10 Replace choices. You can choose to process Text and/or Mtext.

Working with PET Menu's

All PET menu's work in a similar manner to create an Action List made up of any combination of Search actions and Replace Actions. The menu will initially have no Action items and the default action of all Criteria is to Find Everything and Change Nothing, so if you pick OK in the ASR menu with no Action Items, all blocks will be found and selected (they are also stored in a named selection set).

Here's an example of creating an Action: First you choose which Criteria you want to set - in this example we will set the Search Block Layer criteria in the ASR menu. When you pick it from the pulldown, it will be entered into the Action Entry area. You will see the Criteria name and a Help string to remind you of the setting choices. Next you make your entry in the Value field and click the Add Button. This will Add your entry to the Action List and you are ready to enter the next item.

Search choices include 10 Search Text Criteria. Some Search Criteria can specify a Range of values. These include Search Text Height, Rotation, Width and Obliquing Angle. So if you specify a Search Text Height of Scale of 10R15, PET will find text with height between 10 & 15.

Replace choices include 10 Replace Text Criteria. Some of the special replace features include: Replace Text Case - you can choose Lower, Upper or Capitalize. Replace Text Position allows a move instruction with our special Angle Option. If you enter "@10<A90" this will move the Text 10 units at an angle equal to the Current angle PLUS 90 degrees. So if your text has been rotated to follow a linework feature such as a street edge, you can move all of them relative to their rotation, into the street (A270) or out of the street (A90).

Absolute or Relative - Some Replace Criteria allow either Absolute or Relative settings. These include Replace Text Height, Rotation, Width and Obliquing Angle. An entry of 90 for Replace Text Rotation will rotate text by 90 degrees (from their existing angle) but an entry of @90 will change the rotation angle to be 90 no matter what it's current angle is.

An Example: Here's a real world example using a street map from the Census Bureau. The original drawing has all text labels on the same layer but they are 3 different sizes (based on street classification). We use TSR to search for Text based on a range of heights then change the layer, set its height to an absolute size, change its font and change all characters to upper case. To process all 3 sizes of text, we need to run TSR 3 times with different setting for Search Height and Replace Layer. This gives us the standardized Text we want but one more job remains - the Text labels need to be aligned with the closest linework entity. We can use ATAUTO for this (sold separately) to yeild the result we want.

A MapTools Commander Automation Demo - The above example is included with the MapTools Demos. All four functions are grouped together as a MapTools Commander Instructions Set named TSRDEMO1 (included with every MapTools product), so all four tasks can be accomplished with a single menu pick.