TextSync
Batch-edit text across drawings — MText, DBText, plus text styles.
AutoCAD 2021–2027 · English / 日本語 / 简体中文
Text → Excel: add DWG files, export every DBText and MText string.
The problem
No good tool exists for bulk text edits, translation passes, or unifying fonts/styles across a project.
How TextSync works
These are the tabs inside the actual app, in the order they appear — every screenshot below is a real, unedited capture of TextSync running.
Step 1 — Export every text string to one workbook
Add DWG files and export every DBText and MText string into one Excel workbook, ready to translate or bulk-edit.
- 1Add Files… or Add Folder… — Add Folder has its own "include subfolders" setting under Settings → General for deep project trees.
- 2Turn on Parallel processing to read multiple files at once on larger batches.
- 3Export to Excel writes every matched entity — file, handle, entity type, layer and content — into one workbook, reporting how many records came from how many files, and flagging any file that failed to read.
Options on this screen
- Parallel processing
- Read text from multiple DWG files at once instead of one at a time.
Step 2 — Write edited text back, matched and backed up
Pick the edited workbook and the DWG folder — TextSync matches every row back to its file and writes only what changed.
- 1Browse to the Excel workbook you edited, and the DWG folder to match against — defaults to the Excel file's own folder.
- 2Matched Files lists every file along with how many entities in it are about to change; anything in the workbook with no matching DWG shows up under Unmatched instead of failing the whole run.
- 3Leave Automatic backup on so every file is copied before writing — Restore Backup… can undo the run afterward.
- 4Write Back applies the edits. The confirmation dialog states exactly how many files and how many entities in total are about to change, and warns explicitly if backup is off.
Options on this screen
- Use the Excel file's folder
- Automatically point the DWG folder picker at wherever the workbook itself lives.
- Automatic backup
- Copy each file before writing back to it, so a run can be undone with Restore Backup….
Step 3 (independent) — Unify fonts and text styles project-wide
Read every text style across a batch of drawings into one table, batch-edit font/width-factor/fixed-height, and write the changes back — including re-rendering the text that uses them.
- 1Add Files — every TextStyle defined in each drawing is read automatically into one table: style name, font, big font, width factor, fixed height, and whether it's that file's current style.
- 2Tick the fields you want to change (Font, Big Font, Width Factor, Fixed Height), enter the new values, then Apply to Selected or Apply to All to batch-edit every checked style row at once.
- 3Create Text Style adds a brand-new named style to every file that doesn't already have it, in one action — useful for rolling out a standard company style across a project.
- 4Make Current sets a given style as the active/default TextStyle in its file.
- 5Write Styles Back commits the edits — critically, this also updates WidthFactor/Height on every matching DBText in the drawing, not just the style definition, so existing text actually re-renders at the new proportions instead of silently staying the old width.
Options on this screen
- Font / Big Font
- Change the SHX or TrueType font (and optional big-font file for CJK) a style uses.
- Width Factor
- Batch-set the horizontal scale factor applied to text using this style.
- Fixed Height
- Batch-set a fixed text height for the style (0 leaves height adjustable per-entity, as normal).
Also included
Unified extraction across entity types
Most batch text workflows have to pick one entity type at a time. TextSync extracts single-line DBText and multiline MText into the same sheet, tagged by entity type and source file, in one pass.
Diff-free, but never silent
Excel → Text and Batch Edit Styles don't show a line-by-line diff grid the way BlockSync does, but every write-back is preceded by an explicit confirmation naming the exact file and entity counts, and followed by a report naming any failures — nothing changes unannounced.
Backup and rollback on every write-back path
Excel → Text and Batch Edit Styles both support automatic backup with one-click Restore Backup…/Rollback All, exactly like BlockSync — the same safety pipeline, applied to text instead of block geometry.
Style edits actually change how text looks
Changing a TextStyle's width factor in raw AutoCAD only affects entities that don't override it per-instance. TextSync's Write Styles Back explicitly re-applies the new width factor and fixed height to every DBText using that style, so a font/proportions cleanup doesn't quietly fail to show up on screen.
Environment & requirements
Everything that determines whether TextSync will run on your machine, and how it behaves once it does.
- No Microsoft Excel installation required — TextSync reads and writes .xlsx directly with its own engine (ClosedXML).
- Windows 10/11, 64-bit only.
- Requires a licensed, full version of AutoCAD (2021–2027). AutoCAD LT is not supported — LT can't run the background automation TextSync depends on.
- If more than one AutoCAD version is installed, pick which one to use under Settings → AutoCAD, or leave it on "Auto (newest installed)" — if that version fails to load for any reason, it falls back to another installed version automatically.
- Built on .NET 8. If the .NET 8 Desktop Runtime isn't already on your machine, the installer prompts to fetch it from Microsoft (free, one-time, roughly 60 MB).
- Network access is used only to check your license at startup and periodically afterward. Scanning, reading and writing all happen locally through AutoCAD's own engine — no drawing content is ever uploaded.
- Interface language: English / 日本語 / 简体中文.
- Batches of many files can process several drawings in the background in parallel — tune "Max parallel AutoCAD instances" in Settings to trade speed for CPU/memory headroom.
- Every long-running action shows a progress bar with a percentage and estimated time remaining, and can be canceled mid-run.
- Settings → Diagnostics → Open Log Folder gets you straight to the host and plugin logs if something needs troubleshooting.
See also the site-wide system requirements page comparing all tools.
Scenarios
A few of the situations TextSync is built for — if yours isn't listed, it's probably still covered by one of the tabs above.
Text style unification
Before
A project inherited inconsistent fonts and text styles across dozens of drawings.
After
Map old styles to new ones once, apply across the whole set, verify with a report.
Time saved
~5 hours → 15 minutes
Client name / terminology change across notes
Before
A client is renamed, or a standard term changes (a system name, a department label) and it's scattered across MText notes, DBText labels and callouts on every sheet — a plain text editor can't reach inside DWGs, so it means opening each file and eyeballing every note.
After
Export every text entity to Excel, find-and-replace the term project-wide, write back with automatic backup — one pass instead of a manual sweep through every sheet.
Time saved
~4 hours → 15 minutes
Translation pass for a multi-region project
Before
A drawing set needs to ship with translated notes and labels (e.g. English to Japanese) — extracting just the text content without touching geometry, translating it, and getting it back into the right entities is normally a manual, error-prone copy-paste exercise.
After
Text → Excel pulls every note and label into one column-per-entity sheet a translator can work in directly; Excel → Text writes the translated strings back to the exact same entities, matched by file and handle.
Time saved
~1 day per 50-drawing set → same-day turnaround
Standard note update after a spec revision
Before
A referenced spec section number changes ("see spec 15400" becomes "see spec 23 05 00"), and that boilerplate note appears verbatim on dozens of sheets across a project — a global search-and-replace inside AutoCAD alone can't safely target just that text.
After
Export, replace the exact note text once in Excel, write back to every sheet that had it — with a report confirming exactly how many entities changed.
Time saved
~2 hours → 10 minutes
What early testers are saying
TextSync hasn't had a public release yet, so there's no customer roster to quote — these are real notes from early testers, attributed by role rather than name.
“One line of text in a fixed spot needs to change, and it's on a few hundred sheets. There's no realistic way to do that by hand without missing some.”