CAD Standards Checker - blocks

[mmccarter]

We are a medium size geomatic survey company who have traditionally not used or had need to use blocks in our drawings and part of our QC procedure was to ensure that there were no blocks in our drawings at all.

I have now moved us out of the dark ages and am we are going to start using blocks where possible (this won't be a lot and the vast majority will only be a simple two line cross block to represent where spot levels have been taken).

I am also starting to use the CAD standards checker as part of our QC procedure which is great for layers/linetypes/lineweights etc. What I want to know is how to add other things to be checked to the .dws file such as block names against a list of acceptable blocks to ensure that there are no rogue temporary blocks etc in our drawings.

Also, does anyone else have any experience of using more advanced .dws files so that more than just layer info and fonts etc can be checked?
One thing I had in mind for this was to ensure that all objects are set so that colour/lineweight and linetype are by layer and not set to continuous etc by accident.


Our current QC procedure has been created by our in house CAD guru in the form of a lisp routine that outputs what we need to check to a txt file. The trouble with this is that ALL blocks are listed and ALL layer names are listed. I would like to move to the automated method of the CAD standards checker as we prefer it's output and ways of showing different info in the .chx file.

Just out of interest, do many of you use this function to enforce standards or do you have other ways of keeping control on your drawings?


edit: one other thing which we (as most of you) enforce is that nothing is left on layer 0. Can the .dws file be set up so that if there is anything on layer 0 this is reported back as a non conformity?

[Augi Doggie]

....

Just out of interest, do many of you use this function to enforce standards or do you have other ways of keeping control on your drawings?

From what I know of the CAD standards checker, it only checks for, Layers, Text styles, Linetypes and Dimension styles. It does not check for blocks and does not check for objects in the Defpoints and 0 layers.

It will allow you to make "suggested" changes to layer names and it will also convert object linetypes and colors to Bylayer. I use it for those features and it is a very powerful tool, it's just lacking in functionality. I hope that Autodesk will revisit it in future releases.

I hope that helps a little bit.

[robert.1.hall72202]

I have some blocks that I like to use for text.
It would be nice if AutoCad could tell me if the designer had
used the blocks all throughout the drawing.

I bet a lisp routine could be used to create a non printing layer and
then use the layer to throw a quick symbol on the insertion point
of every block within a drawing.

Any takers? I am not good with lisp. I am assuming this could be done.

[kevinm.50732]

Did anyone ever develop this lisp? Does it exist somewhere online?
Please let me know.

kevin

[KGC]

i have yet to see one, but i have been really thinking of looking into making one. Although my lisp writing is not all that good, i still may be able to get an idea of how to do this.