Last updated July 28, 2026
Copy a piece of text and change the wording in one operation. You pick the text, place the copy, and it immediately asks what the new copy should say — so the two steps that always go together are joined up.
It is by Craig Carr of Superior Designs, written in 1995, and he also wrote the text standardiser, the layer setter, the leader-and-text routine and the running-total calculator on this site.
Where it earns its keep
Labelling a row of similar things. Six doors that need numbering, a run of room names, a column of equipment tags. The text is already the right height, style, layer and rotation — you want another one of those, saying something slightly different.
Doing it by hand is copy, place, then double-click and retype, and the retyping is where you lose the formatting if you go the other route and place fresh text instead. Copying inherits everything and changes only the wording, which is the correct instinct.
The copy is placed with a normal AutoCAD copy operation, so all the usual snaps, tracking and coordinate entry are available for positioning it — the routine does not take that away from you.
The command name is heavily contested
The command is CT, and this is the worst collision on the site.
Three separate downloads here define a command called CT, and they do three different things:
- This one — copy a piece of text and change its wording.
- CHGTEXT — match the height and style of one text object onto a selection.
- TOOLS — change colour and linetype of a selection.
Load any two of those and the later one silently replaces the earlier. There is no warning, and the failure mode is that a command you use daily starts doing something unrelated to what you expected.
If you want more than one of them, rename. It is a single word at the top of each file.
How to load it
Unzip Cct.zip and load cct.lsp with APPLOAD, or put it in the Startup Suite. No support files. Our AutoLISP guide covers loading.
Step-by-step usage
- Type CT.
- At “Select Text” click the text you want to copy.
- At “Copy To Point” pick where the copy goes. Snaps and coordinate entry work as normal.
- Type the new wording for the copy.
Note that the copy takes its position from where you picked the original, so pick the original at a consistent spot — its insertion point, say — if you want the copies to line up.
Compatibility notes
1995, so written-for rather than tested-on. It drives the COPY command and edits entity data, neither of which has changed.
Plain AutoLISP with no dialog boxes and no Express Tools calls, so nothing requires the full product; LT users on LT 2024 or later, the release that brought AutoLISP to LT, should be able to run it. See what runs on AutoCAD LT. It adds a copy without altering the original, so nothing existing is at risk.
Download
| Name: | Copy Change Text |
| Description: | This program is used to copy text and then prompt to change the text. |
| Type: | AutoCAD AutoLISP Routine |
| Author: | Craig Carr |
| File Size: | 1 Kb |
| Cost: | Free |
| Worked on: | AutoCAD |
| Download File: | Cct.zip |
Related routines
- MET — change a piece of text without copying it first.
- Numbering collection — better suited to a sequence of numbered labels.
- CHGTEXT — the other CT, and one of the collisions above.