How to make text blocks flow properly top to bottom

Would you be able to provide details of the version of MicroStation you are currently using. It would also be helpful if you could provide an example or screen capture to help explain what is happening in relation to this query.

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As you can see within picture, some blue text has been highlighted. That is what happens when I select from that first paragraph to the last paragraph. It doesn't make sense at the first glance, but then you quickly realize that what it's doing is it took the end of block of node as the start and flipped it over. Make sense? 

My version is 08.11.09.459. 

At first glance from this example you provided it appears to be displaying fine. I think you will need to point to exactly what is happening to this text as I cannot see what you're trying to explain. Maybe if you supplied an example design file?

At first glance from this example you provided it appears to be displaying fine. I think you will need to point to exactly what is happening to this text as I cannot see what you're trying to explain. Maybe if you supplied an example design file?

So, the problem isn't that it wasn't displaying fine. This isn't a display problem. We are NOT talking about display order if that is what I was not being clear about.

Essentially, imagine you have a  word document, you select text and it flows around the page, typically from when you start dragging to where you release your click drag. For example, if I select text on this webpage, it will select stuff that goes where you start selecting, to where you end selecting. I have screenshot it below with red marks showing how I click dragged my cursor to select what I wanted to. 

The issue becomes, how microstation text gets organized within the PDF file when I plot multiple blocks of text for note pages. For instance, I zoomed in further for this one paragraph here that I have plotted from Micro. I have used red arrows to mark the click drag operation, with the start of the arrow at my start of drag and tip of the arrow at the end. It might look normal at the first glance, but look closer - the text selected doesn't flow right. English doesn't go right-to-left, it should have gone left-to-right. 

So, this can be caused by the text thinking that we are in an RTL instead of LTR language. But after some testing, that is not the case. The problem appears to be caused by the plot of the block of text (PDF) from microstation has started these texts from the last line of the node instead of the first. Which, brings us back to what I showed within my first example. 

Here, you can easily see 3 "titles" for each "block" of text. The body are all one single node, whereas the title is another node, making the total number of text nodes here 6. I have ordered the text nodes by creation sequencing, so that it flows according to the page. In here, I click dragged from the middle of the first paragraph (i.e. text node # 2 per sequence), to the middle of the last paragraph (i.e. text node # 6 per sequence). Ideally, what should happen is that the pink box below gets selected, but as you can see, the selection is totally off. And with how the selection ran within our example here, it is not an LTR vs RTL text flow problem. It will appears that Micro just simply took the last line of the text node as start, and start of the text node as end. 

Will there be an effective way to resolve this problem? Or is it just a Microstation bug?

Andrew Bell said:

I think you will need to point to exactly what is happening to this text as I cannot see what you're trying to explain. Maybe if you supplied an example design file?

I agree: the screenshots don't help to explain the unwelcome text behaviour.

I S Chan said:

imagine you have a  word document, you select text and it flows around the page

MicroStation is not a word processor.  It's a spatial editor.  Blocks of text (text elements?  text nodes?) are not connected.  You can't select mutiple text elements and pretend that they form a paragraph.

Post a DGN example with text that illustrates your problem.  You've redacted confidential information, so it might be best if you were to prepare a test case and attach that DGN file to your post here.

I S Chan said:

Will there be an effective way to resolve this problem? Or is it just a Microstation bug

When I have to do this kind of thing I do it in Word first  and either paste it direct in the text editor  or use paste special and embed it so it lives in the file especially if I'm getting stuck with the indenting.. ( should be easy  in mstn but I never seem to get it perfect like in word).

Make sure in the  place text  dialog you untick applies all text and you can then have large and small text same fonts helps but its best to use the same font in both word and mstn say eg Arial. When you paste it it should be ONE big text node  not several.. I think that's where your having your  difficulty.. I have done both methods  in this here in image from a pdf (attached) of my dgn  left side  copy paste into text editor and right side embedded paste special..

I like the paste special  for word, and excel because you can edit it in place and  it lives inside the dgn and  if you send to clients you need only send the dgn.

PDF

I  did it  pretty rough  but you can see format is preserved in both ways...

Can't do, I don't control our CAD standards...