If you’ve got the long and laborious task of numbering rooms throughout a floorplan and you can’t bear the thought of copying a tag and then having to edit each individual one, then why not try this nifty little lisp routine ive written which is saved on the X drive under: X/Resources/AutoCAD/AutoCAD LSP Routines/Prefix Auto-Number.

For those who don’t know how to load lisps, type in Appload in AutoCAD and hit enter, navigate to the above location, click on the lisp and hit Load.

Once loaded, within the command line, type in prefix and hit enter. You will then be asked for the prefix so for room numbers enter RM- (or something similar) and hit enter, starting number will be 1, increments will also be 1, text height will depend on your drawing setup and thats it, click away! The text size/style can be edited later so don’t worry about it too much at this stage.

This little gem can be adapted for window numbers (prefix with a W-GF-) or door number (D-GF-) or anywhere else you may be required to number something which will save you tons of time!

Hopefully this should help you all but if you have any problems with it or if there are any other little things like this that you think might make life easier, let me know and i’ll see what I can do!

If z co-ordinates are giving you problems and the flatten command isn’t working or you just don’t want to use it you can try the following alternatives:

Type TREEDEPTH and set the variable to -1 This will make AutoCAD ignore all z co-ordinates so you should be able to keep that 3D topo without any problems.

Or

Enter OSNAPZ and enter 1 When snapping to objects with z co-ordinates the z axis will be ignored and substituted for the UCS elevation.

While downloading OS maps I recently discovered there’s an option to download them in dwg format. I understand that in the past we have mostly used the dxf format, but I found several advantages to the dwg file.

The dwg maps have more logical layer names and have coloured layers for areas that can be turned off and on as necessary which makes colouring drawings in photoshop a dream!

As you can guess I’d recommend using this format in future unless anyone has found a good reason to use the dxf file instead.

myPANTONE Palettes is an interactive color workspace that provides an easy and engaging platform for selecting and working with colors. It integrates into any application that supports system level color pickers. There are multiple ways for designers to select colors through the software:

-Color Pickers: Colors are selected within a hue circle or square hue gradient color picker, or by manually entering RGB or HTML values for known colors.

-PANTONE Palettes: Colors are selected directly from PANTONE Libraries (only with Libraries installed)

-Eye-dropper Tool: Allows users to pick up any color appearing on their desktop.

-Color Blender: Forms a color gradient between two user-defined colors with up to 83 individual steps between them.

-Color Schemes: Colors are selected according to color harmonies: monochromatic, analogous, complementary, split complementary, triadic and tetradic colors.

-Image Palette Builder: Allows users to import an image into the Image Palette Builder and automatically generate a palette using the dominant colors within the image. As many as 12 colors can be automatically generated.

Defining, Saving and Exporting Color Palettes
After selecting individual colors, users can drag and drop them within the myPalettes area to create a color palette. They also have the ability to view any saved palettes, print, export, organize and lock palettes, as well as edit individual color properties.

myPANTONE is a free download once signed up as a Pantone member

After a few minor problems, I have managed to successfully use Revit with ADB to load one room in the Morpeth NHS Centre model with furniture and other fittings. This link has not yet been used within P+HS so I thought I would show you what it can achieve. The blocks imported from ADB are basic, and are subject to a few minor problems (the usual chair appearing in the ceiling etc), however these are easily rectified and in a short space of time I created the following images and a short walk through.

It works in a very similar way to the CAD/ADB link, meaning changes in the Revit model are fed back into the ADB room data sheets and generic room layouts can be saved and duplicated easily and quickly and new items of furniture can be created.

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.

1. To fix this, start off by installing Service Pack 1 – this will prevent the problem reoccurring once the drawings are sorted out. It’s on both our servers ready to install, and only takes 2 mins. Alternatively download it here.
2. Clear out the redundant scales in each drawing by entering the “-SCALELISTEDIT” command. Choose ‘Reset’ and ‘Yes’. Or
3. For batch clearing of entire affected jobs, use Autodesk’s ‘Scale List Clean-up Utility’ to reset the whole lot back to match our template. See Andy (Stokesley) or myself (Leeds) for a hand doing this.

Once everyone is upgraded with the service pack we will never have the problem again. Hopefully.

Did you know that Autocad can check the spelling in your drawings?

Type ‘spell’ in the command line and follow the prompts on the dialogue box that appears.

Make sure the dictionary is set to British English.

Here’s a tip to help with selecting objects, I’ve found it’s very useful when using the stretch command.
Enter a command e.g. stretch, when the select objects prompt appears enter cp for crossing polygon. You can then draw a polygon around the nodes that need stretching and complete the command.

For more info and an explaination of the other selection options such as window polygon follow the link:
CAD Tutor Object Selection Tutorial
You will need to scroll down, as I’m sure everyone’s mastered window selection!