Some years ago (about 12!) I played around with scripts and lisp routines to automate the plotting of drawings. So when a co-worker asked me if I knew of a downloadable routine that could search a series of drawings for a text string, I thought: I'll just rejig my old routines and there we are.
Not really. He was after a system that would search electrical drawings for numbers. The reason for this is that say you have wire number 39 on one drawing, then you want to know where this wire number is on other drawings (maybe the drawing system is at fault here!). Just to add to the fun, some things are attributes, not text. Probably if you looked, you would find some mtext in there as well.
This is all hanging on your finding a thing that will open several drawings in succession.
I have looked, but most of them you have to pay for. To cut a long story short I found the ideal thing-just for opening up drawings: and for free!
I have tested it out by reinserting and updating a title block.
The number finding thing will have to wait.
The routine can be found here:
http://thatcadguy.blogspot.com/2009/10/batch-processing-autocad-drawings.html
There is a trick to it's use-Navigate to the directory, and then select the first file.
Otherwise, it works brilliantly, (yes, I did leave a comment).
Maybe someone at Autodesk might read this and consider putting it in Express Tools?
1 comment:
Great post on a trick that many may be unfamiliar with, very helpful! I work with the McGraw Hill Sweets Network, who offers a huge database of autocad drawings.
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