We've all seen this. You have a nice drawing in front of you, but when you do Zoom Extents (or Zoom All), your drawing disappears and you find yourself floating out somewhere near the (ex)planet Pluto. You select all around outside of what you want to see and there is nothing there.
Sometimes you can zoom around out there and find a stray object and just delete and all is fine. Other times you can copy the 'good' stuff and paste it to another drawing. But what if that fails? The stray objects in question could be damaged entities, or text objects with null text, or blocks with nothing in them.
I had a customer send me such a drawing and after decades of just dealing with it, I wanted to dig deeper. I tried a suggestion whereas you do a Zoom Extents (ZE is one of our aliases) and then hit CTRL+A. This highlights everything in the drawing. The idea here is that you can then see more easily those things out in space, because they have an easy to see grip attached. This didn't work for me.
So I found another video with the right suggestion (from Autodesk no less), for me, for this drawing. This is the link: Erase Empty Objects in AutoCAD
This is what it says to do:
- Type in ERASE
- Hit CTRL+A to select everything in the current space of the drawing, seen and unseen
- Holding down the SHIFT button, grab what you want to keep. This will remove them from the selection set Erase will act upon. The remaining objects may or may not be visible
- Press Enter
In my drawing, out of 80,000 objects, 12 were erased. A subsequent Zoom Extents now worked perfectly.
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