BOP in feet-inches-fractional

[pauljordan]

OK, so I've laid this pipe all over creation now and my fitters are trying to figure out what's going to be butt welded and what's going to be grooved blah, blah..

Well, I used the handy BOP from the tool palettes and it rounds off everything to an even inch! We need things down into fractions as well. I looked at the property sets and you have a choice of Unit - Distance Feet - Inches, no comma, Unit - Distance Feet - Tenths, Unit - Distance Inches - Fractional, and then Unit - Distance Inches - Tenths.

How can I make a new property set that takes the Unit - Distance Feet, Inches, and fractional??

[dkoch]

I do not use MEP, so perhaps what you are looking at is not controled by Property Data Formats, but if it were a property in AutoCAD Architecture that I wanted in a particular format, I would be looking at finding or creating a Property Data Format that showed things the way I wanted them. If none of the MEP users have a better suggestion by the time you look into this again, you might want to look into making a custom Property Data Format.

[stelthorst]

Hi Paul,

As David said you'll need to create a new property data format.

There are a couple of things you'll need to do in order to accomplish this. First, on your tool palette right-click your tag tool and see where the tag is picking up the property data (see attached). Now you have two options:
1. Modify the OOTB content
2. Create a new tag and re-path your tool tag to this location (my preferred method)

Either way the procedure is similar;

1. Open the drawing and either save it as a new name (I keep the same name but add our company name to the beginning so i know it is company created content) or edit the OOTB drawing.
2. Go to FORMAT - Style Manager - Documentation Objects - Property Data Format (PDF)
3. Select the Unit - Distance Feet Inches - No Comma. Right-click it and copy and paste it.
4. Rename the new PDF. (I kept the same name but added "1/8" accuracy" to the end)
5. Click on the new PDF and change the precision to 1/8" (or whatever you want)
6. Now click on Property Set Definitions (PSD) and select the Piping Object PSD.
7. Change the Format of the BottomOfPipeCalc, CenterOfPipeCalc, and TopOfPipeCalc to your newly created PDF.

Now here are the caveats to doing this;

1. If your template already has the Piping Objects PSD in it, the tag will not change unless you also make these changes to your template.
2. By adding the higher precision, the text of the tag will go outside of the box in the OOTB tag. This can be fixed by changing the block that is used by the tag

Hope this helps,

[pauljordan]

Great work Scott!! I was going to give you 16,484 gold stars for that one but, with the economy the way it is, I'll buy you a beer at the next AUGI Beer Bust that we both attend.

That worked like a charm.. I knew it was there, just couldn't get my hands around where it was.

Thanks!