Ghosts in the Machine
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Mysterious leftover objects created by text masking can stick around and contaminate CAD template files. May 16, 2005
Question
I have some objects appearing when I go to the paper space layout. If I drag Viewport to the gray area, I can see them like little black boxes. They are model space objects. They can mask any another objects if I use draworder command, and the problem is that I can not delete them. I deleted all blocks and all objects from drawing, I purged everything, I checked for xrefs (no xrefs in the drawing), but those objects did not disappear. There are only two layers I can not purge - dimension layer and text layer - so I think the objects belong to those layers. How do I delete them?
Forum Responses
(CAD Forum)
From contributor B:
It sounds like the objects are remnants of either the wipeout or textmask commands from express tools. I have had a similar experience but have not found a way to get rid of them. If you move your drawing in model space, the remnant should not move with it. Try starting a new drawing from scratch. If they are not there, then it is possible that whatever template you normally use has been saved with these objects in it. If that is the case, you should create a new template with a drawing started from scratch. Save as .dwt, then when starting new projects, start with the new template you created.
From the original questioner:
Thanks for the response. I have template created as .dwt and those objects are saved with it. So I guess now I have to create a new one and carefully paste all my titleblock objects in it.
From contributor K:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you only see these mysterious objects in paper space, correct? And if I'm right, it's mostly when you have zoomed in or out? I have had these spots. They are always close to my mtext (and they don't print). I have realized that they only occur when I have a second line with no words in my mtext. Say I wrote a note, hit enter, and then space or even erased some text. That leaves an open line on the m-text. So in my case, these objects are showing a second mtext line with nothing on it. I have been able to get rid of these spots by just going into my mtext and deleting at the end of my text string until there are no spaces after my text. I'm not sure if this is what's happening to you - just figured I would give a heads up.
From contributor M:
Thanks for the advice. Yes, those spots actually look like Mtext extensions or similar, but if I even delete all text from drawing, they still are there. You're right - I can see them only in paperspace, because of gray area around actual page layout, but I can also see them in model space if I change black background color to gray or another light color. And you're right that they are only visible when zoomed in, and they can mask another object.
From contributor C:
Another way to hunt them down and kill them *might* be to do as follows: qselect
Use the object type dropdown and look for a custom object you don't recognize. If you find it, select all of them and exit qselect. You can then delete them. You may have to make sure they are not on a locked layer, etc, but this should help.
