You may have noticed Sheet Set Manager (SSM) doesn’t like characters such as:

Of course many of these symbols are often used in title blocks and detail view titles. SSM won’t even accept a simple inch mark (”). I found a way around it.

The other day I was browsing CADdepot’s Shareware Library and found “an autolisp application that builds a chart, which lists the ASCII codes of the current style font.” Their web page says, “This table shows the characters (or symbols) that this font support, but does not have an assigned key on the keyboard. To get such a symbol, simply type %%ASCII code (the number of the symbol in the chart) in your text line.”

In order to download the AutoLISP application you need to register on CADdepot. Once downloaded, type APPLOAD on the command line in AutoCAD to load Chrtest-En.fas. Then type CHRTEST and it will prompt you for the location of the upper-left corner of the table. Take a look at the table to find codes for “invalid characters”.

For example, I wanted to get the inch mark (”) so I could make my detail title say, 24″ WATERMAIN. I looked for it in the table and found this:

34 = "

So I typed the ASCII code into a field with %% in front of it:

24%%34 WATERMAIN

…and in AutoCAD it looked like:

24" WATERMAIN

Beautiful! Yes, these codes make your fields look funky in SSM, but they look good in AutoCAD.

The only thing missing was code for a blank space. When you erase everything in a field, it will display four dashes (—-) instead of nothing. To force it to be blank you need to hold down the ALT key and type 0160 – code for a non-breaking space.

Problem solved.