How to Mark Up a Drawing - Tips for Engineers

We love clear markups.

One of our engineering clients uses a unique combination of the free Autodesk viewer, TrueView along with Microsoft Paint.

He creates jpgs of the drawing in TrueView and marks them up in Paint. The result is easy for us to read.

In this example, in order to explain his revision, the engineer has included a view of the 3D Model, an acutal photo of the device + a relevant part of the 2D AutoCAD drawing.

An organized image like this is worth a thousand words.

How to Change the Width of an Ellipse Line in AutoCAD?

The line which defines the Ellipse entity in AutoCAD is a Spline. It is not possible to edit the width of a line created as a Spline. (At least we do not know of a way.)

Recreate your Ellipse as a pline. Type the system varaible, PELLIPSE at the command line and set it to the value of 1. Now redraw your Ellipse. It will be a Pline. Use the PEDIT command to change the width.


More discussion about this topic on Augi:
Convert Ellipse to Polyline

Wise Tips on When to Outsource

Wise Outsourcing has more benefits than just saving money

Small Business - The Adviser- SFGATE - 12/26/07





Contact ClearLogicGroup to learn more about how we can help you with our CAD outsourcing services.

CAD TechRX -Top 5 Hits - The 5 Most Viewed Pages - December 2007

How to Import ESRI Arcview Shape Files Into AutoCAD
techrx.blogspot.com/2007/09/mxd-to-dwg-import-shape-files-to.html

Recommended CAD Software - Cabinet Vision for Kitchen Design /Woodwork
techrx.blogspot.com/2007/07/cad-software-watch-planits-cabinet.html

Arxerror-Eduplicatekey Nightmare - Fix It.
techrx.blogspot.com/2006/11/quick-fix-arxerror-eduplicatekey.html

Still Unsolved! KeyCAD Mystery
techrx.blogspot.com/2007/04/keycad-mystery.html
$10.00 Reward for Quality Info on this KeyCAD Posting
http://techrx.blogspot.com/2007/09/cad-techrx-5-most-viewed-pages-sept.html

How to Open AutoCAD Drawing in ESRI Arcview
techrx.blogspot.com/2007/08/how-to-open-autocad-dwg-file-in-arcview.html

AutoCAD DWG to Adobe Illustrator

If you need to use Editable AutoCAD files in Adobe Illustrator the following options are recommended.

Best Option: Create a PDF file of the AutoCAD file.

Alternate Option (mixed results): Save the AutoCAD DWG file to R2000 format.

Not Recommended: Exporting the DWG file as an EPS can corrupt or distort the original.

Tip: If consistent & specific lineweights are required in Illustrator, set your lineweights to bylayer inside AutoCAD.

CAD Software Watch - OrCAD for Circuit Board Layout

We are always learning about specialized CAD applications & markets from our customers. ORCAD, from Cadence, is recommeded for circuit board design and layout.

ORCAD 16.0 Demo Software on Cadence.com:
Test Drive ORCAD

ORCAD Community Forum:
ORCAD Online Tech Support

Wikipedia on ORCAD:
What is ORCAD?

Empty AutoCAD Drawing Syndrome - AutoCAD for Principals

It is not unusual for us to receive a drawing with missing Xrefs from a customer who needs a deadline met yesterday!

Our unlucky client then has to negotiate with their contact to retrieve the missing files or even worse, look through an old project and try to figure out where all the needed drawings are.

If you open an AutoCAD drawing and see that it is empty, the file may be missing Xrefs. These are simply more drawing files linked to your drawing.

One way to determine if absent Xrefs are the culprit is to look for a text string in the drawing which indicates the path of the missing file. See screen shot example. The size of this text can vary depending on settings in the drawing. In this case, the small horizontal line (to which black arrow points) is actually a line of text which contains the path of the missing file.

The XREF command will list all the Xrefs in the drawing along with their current status in a dialog box.

We recommend that you encourage those you work with to send you AutoCAD drawings using Etransmit. This command pulls all relevant files into a convenient zip file so that Xrefs should be included if they are available.

Core FTP Lite - Reviewed by Dummies!

We like to experiment with different FTP clients.

Recently, we tested CoreFTP Lite. We decided that we don't recommend it for non-technical users or diverse remote teams. It is good for IT pros who have experience with FTP servers.

Findings here are the results of running several CAD projects with this client.

Pros:

Free to download and install.

Seems to get through everything. Helpful if you are running or monitoring FTP servers with multiple projects and/or users with different rights. You can easily see where security needs to be tightened.

Cons:

Settings are finicky. We had to keep changing SSL check box options because our selections did not always work consistently.

Our offsite teams did not get reliable results. They complained of time-outs while downloading large amounts of data over slow connections.

Not recommended if you have to download files to a Windows server.

MXD to DWG - Import Shape Files to AutoCAD MAP

You cannot bring an Arcmap drawing into AutoCAD. Arcmap is composed of a series of shape files.

If you have AutoCAD Civil 3D 2007, you can import shape files into CAD but not the actual MXD.

Click on the MAP menu then click on Tools then click on Import.

A dialog box prompts you to navigate to the shape file you want. Then you get another dialog box that prompts you to select from various settings before you bring your shape file into the CAD drawing.

You need some knowledge of GIS and shape files to figure this out but with trial and error you can resolve it. You will have to reconstruct the Arcmap drawing, shape file by shape file. If there are many shape files, you have to import each one individually.

Using this same procedure you can also bring in files from other applications like Microstation and Mapinfo.

CAD TechRx - The 5 Most Viewed Pages - Sept. 2007

KEYCAD MYSTERY - CAN YOU SOLVE IT? $10.00 Reward!

We would like more information on this popular posting.
$10.00 Reward for quality answers to our questions below.

Email submittals to:support@clearlogicgroup.com

If you are using Keycad, do you recommend it?

Is KCW a Keycad file extension as stated here?
techrx.blogspot.com/2007/04/keycad-mystery.html

AUTOCAD - ARXERROR-EDUPLICATEKEY
techrx.blogspot.com/2006/11/quick-fix-arxerror-eduplicatekey.html

AUTOCAD - CAN'T ZOOM VIEWPORT
techrx.blogspot.com/2007/05/autocad-cant-zoom-viewport-dont-panic.html

VECTORWORKS 12 EXPORT OPTIONS
techrx.blogspot.com/2006/09/vectorworks-12-export-options-export.html

CARBONITE - BACK-UP YOUR HARD DRIVE
techrx.blogspot.com/2007/05/carbonite-dont-stress-back-up-your-hard.html