We have 5 licenses of the software CadStandardsManager from CAD Masters this software lets you import drawings and compare drawings and xrefs against the company standard reasonably quickly in one operation. However is reasonably pricey, this the case i plan to reserve the licenses of CSM for the designer in the office who regularly check other peoples CAD work as they can use the tools to swap out non standard items such as layers and block quicker in CSM than using the built in Autodesk tools.
To provide other CAD uses with the content of the cad standards database one option will be to use the free tools from the CadManagerTools (CMT) website for managing inserting standardized content for layers, Blocks and Details. The are called
LayerLibraryManager
BlockManager
DetailManager
DimStyleLibraryManager
LinetypelibraryManager
Each place of software takes I little bit of setting up of the text files and databases that sit in the background but this is not hard. Below I explain the workflow to setup the .lay file for the layerlibrary manager from an existing drawing template.
Note: There are also built in Autocad cad standards checking tools but these require a drawing standards file called a .dws to be setup for comparison against and they do not provided the quickest tools for swapping out and replacing non standard cad data.
CML Layer Library Manager Setup
CML Layer Library Manager reads a .lay textfile to gives the cad user a list of standard layers to search and choose from. The .lay files can be saved central on a server in a common location and the user interface pointed to the shared location. On the Aireys Queenstown server the .lay files have been setup in the
The .lay textfile has the following format.
One of the shipped Example file
In order to create a .lay file for the users to see from an existing drawing template, you can use the following workflow
1. Download the free lisp routine from Lee Mac Programming called Layerextract.
2. Open the drawing you want to extract standard layers from.
3. Type appload and browse to the Layerextract.lsp file and load it.
4. Type Layerextract at the commandline to start the routine the following dialog box appears.
5. Setup the settings in the dialog box as follows.
6. Open excel and Browse to the txt created. On opening the text file use fixed with as the delimiter and make sure the column dividers in the preview are move so that the column split occur at the right locations.
7. Within Excel
- Change the order of the Plot and Plot Style columns
- Change the column for Plot Style to Transparency and make all values in the column zero.
- Change the text in the Plot column from “No” and “Yes” to “Plot” and “Noplot” using the find and replace tool with in excel.
- Make sure something is typed in the description column for every layer if not these will not be able to be inserted into the drawing form the into the Layer Library app later.
9. Save the edit file as a csv file from excel. This is so we can swap the “,” separator for a “|” later in Notepad++
10. Download and install the free program Notepad++
11. Using Notepad++ we edit will amended csv file to have the default separator for imported into layer Library manager.
12. Use replace to swap the “,” to a “|” save the file to the network location you are pointing the layer library app too.
