Order, paths and what gets skipped

Numbering is only useful if the order matches the way someone reads the sheet. Increment offers three ways to decide it.

Reading sweeps

Four named sweeps, all running left to right:

• Across then down: the top-left object is 1, along the row, then the next row down
• Across then up: the same, starting from the bottom
• Down then across: down the first column, then the next column
• Up then across: the same, starting from the bottom

A small diagram sits beside the picker and traces the letter the sweep makes (a Z for the row sweeps, an N for the column ones), so the direction reads without decoding the words.

Rows are worked out from the objects themselves. Nothing asks you for a tolerance in drawing units, because that is a number no one can answer without measuring first. Objects that sit roughly level are treated as one row, and the window reports what it found: “3 rows detected”, so you can check the answer against what you see rather than trusting a setting.

Selection order

For a run no pattern describes. Pick the objects one at a time, in the order you want them numbered, then run MDINCREMENT: they number in that order.

A drawn path

When the objects follow a route rather than a grid (around a corridor, along a wall, down a riser), tick Number along a drawn path and press Draw path.

The window gets out of the way and you draw a polyline through the drawing. Objects are then numbered by how far along that path they sit.

• Object snap and ortho work as they do in any AutoCAD command.
• Undo removes the last point, Done or Enter finishes, Escape cancels.
• The path is kept when you untick the box, so the tick is a switch and not a destructive one.
• Ticked with nothing drawn yet, the window says so rather than quietly falling back to the sweep controls it has just greyed out.

What gets skipped, and why

Two things cannot be rewritten as plain text without destroying what is in them, so Increment refuses to:

• A field-bound attribute. Its value is generated, by a sheet-set property, a drawing property, a formula. Overwriting it with a number replaces the field with dead text, and the link is gone.
• Formatted mtext. The only way to write mtext is to replace its contents wholesale, which discards the inline formatting the author put there.

Neither is dropped from the list. Both appear in the changes list, greyed, with the reason, so a run that writes fewer objects than you expected always says why, and you can decide whether to fix the object or leave it.

Formatted mtext is the one you can override: a setting flips it from skip to write, accepting that the formatting goes. Fields are never overwritten.

Which attribute gets written

When the selection holds blocks carrying several attributes, pick the tag to write. The list shows how many objects carry each one: TAG (12), which is the fastest way to notice you have picked a tag only twelve of your forty blocks actually have.

Leave it unset and the first tag found in the selection is used.

Objects that already hold the right value

They are counted and reported as already correct rather than written again. That keeps a re-run honest: numbering the same selection twice with the same settings reports everything as already correct and changes nothing.