Well, to those who recognise the title of the post, this AutoCAD error message may be one you’ve come accross before, however, for the benefit of all; i’ll go into a little more detail.

Working on some drawings recently, i found that when it came to plotting out the layout, the “Plot style table (pen assignments)” were missing! (As the following image of the plot window shows, to the top-right)

One reason suggested for this is 3rd party xrefs altering the plot style settings, but i’m open on being corrected if that’s not the right answer. Anyway, the fix is a lot more straightforward than trying to figure out the reason. All you have to do is type “CONVERTPSTYLES” as a command type in either model or paper space and you get the following message.

On this step the work has all been done for me; the handy little pop-up message explains it all… Once you’ve hit “OK” the command then runs the fix and… voila! it’s done. Now continue as you would normally and go to plot the drawing; you should see the following plot window with all the plot styles back to normal!

Select the desired plot style and there you have it! All courtesy of Tom (the genius) Potter. So please forward all thanks onto him.

Problem:

If you’ve ever had problems within AutoCAD, while using drawings with xrefs; then this is hopefully a step toward solving your miseries. Common symptoms of this effect are; slow processing speed, delayed response to command types, agonising movement of the cursor when adjusting viewports, etc, etc.

Knowledge:

“When a file contains excess scales, performance may be negatively affected. Eventually, the file may become unusable. To use the file, the extra scales must be removed” (www.cadtutor.net). There is a command type within AutoCAD that repairs affected files by removing these unwanted excess scales.

Procedure:

Have the drawing open in your AutoCAD application and then type the following command: ‘-scalelistedit’

Next it asks: Enter option? Type ‘R’ for Reset

Finally it asks: Reset scale list to defaults? Then type ’Y’ for Yes

Further tips:

It’s a good idea at this point to also Purge & Audit the drawing in order to optimise the file.

Simply type and hit enter for the following: ’PU’ for Purge - and then select ‘Purge All’ until nothing is left to purge. ‘AUDIT’ for audit - and then type ‘Y’ for yes when it asks if you want to Fix any errors detected.