2004

348 | Chapter 16 Draw Geometric Objects
The first nonblank character following the C:QUOTE or C:DELIM field name
becomes the respective delimiter character. For example, if you want to
enclose character strings with double quotes, include the following line in
your attribute extraction template file:
C:QUOTE “
The quote delimiter must not be set to a character that can appear in a char-
acter field. Similarly, the field delimiter must not be set to a character that
can appear in a numeric field.
If you specified an SDF format using the sample template, the file might be
similar to the following example.
The order of the fields corresponds to the order of the fields in the template
files. You can use these files in other applications, such as spreadsheets, and
you can sort and manipulate the data as needed. For example, you can open
an attribute extraction file in Microsoft
®
Excel in which you can specify a
separate column for each field. See the documentation for your spreadsheet
program for information about how to use data from other applications. If
you open the file in Notepad or another Windows text processor, you can
paste the information back into the drawing as text.
Nested Blocks
The line BL:LEVEL in a template file reports the nesting level of a block ref-
erence. A block that is inserted in a drawing has a nesting level of 1. A block
reference that is part of (nested within) another block has a nesting level of
2, and so on.
For a nested block reference, the X,Y, Z coordinate values, scale factors, extru-
sion direction, and rotation angle reflect the actual location, size, orienta-
tion, and rotation of the nested block in the world coordinate system.
In some complex cases, nested block references cannot be correctly repre-
sented with only two scale factors and a rotation angle, for example, if a
nested block reference is rotated in 3D. When this happens, the scale factors
and rotation angle in the extracted file record are set to zero.
(NAME) (X) (Y) (SUPPLIER) (MODEL) (PRICE)
DESK 120.0 49.5 ACME INDUST. 51-793W 379.95
CHAIR 122.0 47.0 ACME INDUST. 34-902A 199.95
DESK -77.2 40.0 TOP DRAWER
INC.
X-52-44 249.95