AutoCAD Toolkit Tips

As many of us who push the bleeding edge inevitably find out, we occasionally create a few unexpected problems.   While those problems can be easily remedied, the tools we have available are somewhat tedious.   Annotation Objects are one such animal that, whenAnnonLargeNumberofScales.png introduced into our workflow, proceeded to cause other performance issues.

The use of External References produced and spawned a very large list of Annotation Scales.  For example, in this set of drawings for a site currently almost built – each drawing has almost 1700 scales – and there is 5 different external references.   Small file – long load.  Not good.

Autodesk released a tool to cleanup Scale Lists externally, automatically and across multiple files and folders.  Shaan Hurley blogged about it back in April here.

Well, silently, Autodesk released another tool to cleanup multiple files of one of the other items that will slow some Civil 3d drawings – Registered Applications.   These RegApps can cause performance issues with opening, plotting, or e-transmitting any AutoCAD drawing.   You can download it here and get a little more information in Technical Service Document here.

Yes, individually, the command -ScalelistEdit -R and the –Purge Regapp options are still available.  But who wants to process all of the drawings you produce or your office produces one at a time.

6 comments

  1. Fred Mitchell says:

    We created a simple lisp routine as part of our startup. It resets all the scales in each drawing when it opens it. Works for us.

  2. Mark Jung says:

    We also have a scale list cleanup in our startup. It’s made a big difference and has made that problem almost nonexistent.

    The regapps issue is another story though. I don’t think it’s caused any major problems and it’s become a habit to purge them every so often. But being able to purge them from multiple drawings will be handy. I’ll have to check out the utility. Thanks for letting us know about it.

  3. Patrick Lau says:

    I too have added a line to our startup files to reset the scale list and I have also added the -purge Regapps to everyone’s save button which has prevented the regapps from becoming a problem.

  4. Terry Laird says:

    I ran the -purge and pureged out the Regapps it found over 900 regapps and removed them from the drawing. I then saved the drawing and reopened it and did the same thing and it all of them again, anyone know why does it not save the drawing with them removed?

  5. Terry – Do you have any External References in that drawing?

  6. Scott McEachron wrote a good article on Regapps here