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Friday, February 16, 2007

A non Electrical Use for Acad E...

I recently had a friend who needed to open, zoom extents and save 5000 plus AutoCAD drawings in AutoCAD 2007. He came over to myself and another co-worker and asked the question what's the easiest way to do this. We thought about it for a couple minutes and said let's go "Old School" and create a script file then use AutoCAD Run Script command to run it. So we commenced to tell him how to create a text file with a list of all of the files in it. (in a dos command window go to the top level directory that you want to get the list of and type "dir /s/b *.dwg Filename.txt". This will give a list of all files in all sub directories (/s) in a bare format meaning no header information (/b)). Once this is complete he had to open and do a find and replace on "C:\" and replace it with "Open C:\" to tell the script file to open that file. Then he had do a search for ".dwg" and replace it with ".dwg zoom e qsave". This would then zoom extents, then save the drawing then process the next file in the list. This is not a ton of work for 5000 drawings. but I have one quicker way.

Using AutoCAD Electrical go to the Components pull down menu and select the Symbol Library, then Modify Symbol Library option from the menu. Now a Select folder menu will come up so you will select the folder to process. (Note: this doesn't do sub directories, or at least I haven't figured that part out yet.) The next dialog that will come up is the area we can define different things. In this dialog we will check Run Autolisp expression and type in "(Command "Zoom" "E"), then check the Do a Save even if no change check box. Then click Start. Every AutoCAD file in that directory is processed.

This should work in a lot of cases unless you have a ton of drawings buried in sub directories. Just a thought.

Rob Stein

Wednesday, February 07, 2007

March 9th User Group

At the March 9th user group I will be dialed in remotely mostly listen to the presentation and give feedback as well as ask questions.  I am handing over the reigns to another employee at INCAT for that day since I am scheduled to be out of town at that time. I have also arranged for someone from Autodesk to go over the Terminal Strip Editor and possibly some other things depending on how time is going. This should be good because the Terminal Strip Editor has been asked for as a topic a couple of times.

As of right now the user group following March 9th is tentatively scheduled for May 11th. I think at this time we may try to discuss AutoCAD Electrical and Vault maybe or possibly try to gather a panel of people to have a true open Q & A for the full hour if that sounds interesting.

I look forward to talking to you in the near future, and remember to sign up at www.incat.com/events

Rob Stein