Quick Tip - Start an MText List with a Number or Alphabet of Your Choice

Last week I came across one of our designers using this nice trick and thought I would share it with you people. If you want to start a list inside MText window with a number or alphabet of your choice, try the following steps.

1. Type the number or alphabet followed by a period (dot) symbol.
2. Press the tab button after the period symbol
3. Type the content of the first line (optional) and press enter key.

That's it. Now you will find the list starting with the number or alphabet you typed over there. Shown below is a sample list created using the above steps.

In addition to that, a little research on the subject helped me to prefix the list numbers with a custom text, as shown in the image below.

Quick Tip - Generating a Drawing List from Different Folders Using Windows Command Prompt

Most you might already know that typing DIR *.dwg /B > ListFileName in the windows command prompt will provide you with a quick list of drawings in the specific location. What if you want to create a list with drawings from multiple folders? It's a really simple task. See the following sample to get to know the syntax.

DIR D:\Proj_Dir\Disc-1\*.dwg D:\Proj_Dir\Disc-2\*.dwg D:\Proj_Dir\Disc-3\*.dwg /B > D:\Proj_Dir\Dwg_List.txt

As you can see, the paths are seperated by a space. Remember that the /B switch is still required to get the bare format file names. The above command will list all the drawing file names in the folders Disc-1, Disc-2 and Disc-3 to the Dwg_List.txt file. To access windows command prompt, either type CMD in the run prompt or locate it via Start--> All Programs --> Accessories --> Command Prompt.

How to Use DWG TrueView to Optimize Your Drawing Files

Yet another reason to add DWG TrueView to your arsenal. DWG TrueView can be used as an excellent tool to optimize drawing files in batch. With facilities like purging, auditing, xref binding etc. TrueView has become truly irresistible for the CAD managers/administrators/users . Following are the steps involved in the process.

1. Start DWG TrueView and open 'DWG Convert' from the menu. It will launch the 'DWG Convert' dialog box.


2. Click on the 'Conversion Setups' button to open 'Conversion Setups' dialog box. Our idea is to create an exclusive setup for our optimization process.

3. Click on 'New' button to launch 'New Conversion Setup' dialog box and provide a meaningful name over there.

4. Clicking on 'Continue' button will pop up the 'Modify Conversion Setup' dialog box. Here I am going to use the basic settings. You may choose the options as per your requirement. Since our aim is to optimize the drawings (drawing format conversion is not our primary objective), I prefer to use 'In-place (overwrite files)' as my conversion package type. Choose the drawing file format based upon your company/client CAD standards (We normally use AutoCAD 2007 format as we are still on AutoCAD 2008). In the actions area, select 'Check and fix errors' and 'Purge drawings' check boxes as a minimum. Don't forget to provide a conversion setup description at the bottom in order to easily make out the setup objective later on.

5. Click 'Ok' to finalise the setup. You can see the new setup name listed in the 'Conversion Setups' list box.

6. Close the dialog box to go back to the 'DWG Convert' dialog box. Add the drawing files to be optimized using the 'Add file' button in the bottom side. Once the drawings have been added, make sure that the recently created conversion setup is selected in the list. That's it. Just click on convert button and the TrueView application will do the rest for you.

Once the setup is made, you can use the same setup every time you need to optimize the drawings. Really cool, isn't it? The entire process consumes only a little time and resources. In case you haven't installed AutoCAD 2010 yet, TrueView is a must for you as it can bring 2010 format files down to your AutoCAD version compatible format. What else you need to get it installed on your system? DWG TrueView and Autodesk Design Review are FREE and can be downloaded from the Autodesk site.

DATAEXTRACTION Means A Lot More Than Simple Attribute Extraction

How often do you use DATAEXTRACTION wizard for extracting some information other than block attribute data? I have often seen people leaving it behind for tasks like extracting specific text information mentioning that this tool is not powerful enough to get an accurate output. That's not true. Here I am going to show you how to extract a line list from a bunch of Piping & Instrumentation Diagrams (P&ID). The P&IDs contains a lot of other text objects. But with the help of some filtering options, you can extract only the required text information from the drawing.

1. Start DATAEXTRACTION wizard

2. Select the required P&ID drawings (Here I am using sample ones).

3. In the third page select only 'Text' as object type.(Tip: You can uncheck all entries simultaneously by using right click).

4. In the fourth page, select 'Drawing' and 'Text' in the category filter. Also select 'File Name' and 'Value' in the properties area.

5. In the refine data page, you will get a screen similar to the one shown below. This is the area where we are going to play our game. You will notice that the value field contains various text object values from different drawings. We need to confine the list to line numbers.

6. Now right click on the value column and select 'Filter Options' from the right click menu.

7. You will be provided with a filter dialog box as shown in the image below. For our purpose, select the 'Contains' list item from the first list box and type in a wildcard criteria *"-* in the second list box as shown in the picture.

8. Click 'Ok' to apply the filter. Now you can see the value column filtered to show only line numbers based upon the given criteria.

9. Click on 'Next' button and save the output as an excel file or table.


You can easily create various lists from your drawings irrespective of the data containers. Whether it be attribute or text, DATAEXTRACTION is powerful enough to pull the required data based upon different conditions. As the wildcard criteria plays a critical role in extracting the specific data, you need to be very careful to choose the right criteria in order to get proper results.

On a side note, I feel like the command name is a bit too long. It would be a lot better if it were something like DATAXTRACT or even shorter. Anyway, that's not a matter of a concern as we don't use this command very frequently.

Some Interesting Single Key Shortcuts in Autodesk Design Review

For the keyboard fans, who don't like working with menus and ribbons, there are several easy to use keyboard shortcuts inside ADR to make your life a lot easier. Some of those deserve a special mention for the fact that they are single key shortcuts. Using these shortcuts, the navigation options seem to be as easy as in AutoCAD, or even better. Here goes some of the single key shortcuts those caught my eyes at first sight.

R - Zoom Rectangle
F - Fit to Window
Q - Dynamic Zoom
H - Pan
PgUp - Next Page
PgDn - Previous Page
G - Length (Dimension)
N - Full Screen (Toggle)

I personally found the 'R' and 'F' shortcuts combination so terrific that it could easily beat the speed of Z+W and Z+E combination in AutoCAD. For a full list of ADR shortcuts, please refer to the help section inside the application. Unfortunately, I could not find any equivalent shortcut keys for DWG TrueView. If it's not available in TrueView, Autodesk should seriously consider incorporating it, atleast for the navigation options. For sure, these applications are going to be more and more popular in the future.

How To Use Autodesk Design Review As Your Default Raster Image Viewer

Have you had a lot of headache in the past for viewing raster files those are not supported by windows built in image viewer applications? Don't worry, the solution is right under your nose. Apart from serving as an excellent review application, Autodesk Design Review can also be used as a raster image viewer. That means, you don't have to attach the raster images inside AutoCAD to view the contents. Instead, you can directly double click it on the explorer so that it opens directly in the Design Review application. Please make sure that you have done the following steps.

1. Goto Control Panel and double click on 'Folder Options'.
2. Goto the 'File Types' tab.
3. Locate the raster file extension inside the 'registered file types' list
4. If the extension does not exist, then click on 'New' to create a new one.

5. Select the extension from the list and click on 'Change' button shown in the details section.

6. From the next popup window, choose 'Select the program from a list' option.

7. Choose Autodesk DWF Application as the preferred application to open files with this extension. Also remember to check the 'Always use the selected program to open this kind of file' check box shown right under the list.

8. If everything is done properly, it will look as shown in the image below.

That's it. Repeat the same steps for other types of raster files. Once done, you don't have worry about it any more. Now you can goto explorer and double click those files to open it directly inside the Design Review application. I have configured mine to view file types like CAL, CALS, GP4, CG4, MIL, RST, PCT, PICT, TGA, RLS etc. (testing pending for some types). The best part of the story is that you can easily save this image as a DWF(x) file in order to send it to somebody for review purpose.

Autodesk Design Review is a wonderful review application with exciting features like '2D content comparison', 'PDF Support' etc. It's free and can be downloaded from the Autdesk Design Review site.

Assigning Multiple Double Click Actions to Single Entity Type in AutoCAD

In the Unleash the Double Click Power post, you saw how to customize the double click action of an entity type to implement custom double click actions. Now we are going to see how we can implement different double click actions simultaneously on single entity type. Normally, we accomplish this by using Reactors or Events in the respective languages. But, we are not going to use any of these in our method. Rather, we will follow a tricky way to achieve the same result.

As an example, I will show you how to change the double click action of an 'Attribute Block'. Normally double clicking an attribute block shows the Enhanced Attribute Editor Dialog. We are going to change this to show either Enhanced Attribute Editor(_eattedit) or Edit Attributes dialog (_attedit) depending on certain condition. Let's say, when we double click on a title block named TITLE_BLOCK, it should display the Enhanced Attribute Editor dialog and for all other blocks in the drawing, it should display Edit Attributes dialog. The step by step configuration is given below.

1. Open CUI and create a custom command with the following code inside the macro section of the command. If you don't know how to create a custom command, then refer to the 'Unleash the Double Click Power' post mentioned above. Replace the 'TITLE_BLOCK' inside the following code with your actual title block name.
   ^C^C(if (= (cdr (assoc 2 (entget (ssname (ssget "P") 0)))) "TITLE_BLOCK") (command "_eattedit")(command "_ddatte" ))


2. Drag and drop the custom command under the 'Attribute Block' section inside the Double Click Actions.
   


3. Click on 'Apply' and close the CUI dialog.
   

That's it. Now if you double click on the title block, it will open the Enhanced Attribute Editor dialog and for all other attributed blocks, it will open Edit Attributes dialog. By the way, don't forget to take a backup of the default CUI files before you start experimenting with them.