Protecting Blocks

[dan.gamble]

Hey,

I am looking to do a series of blocks for in house use but have been asked if i can apply some kind of watermark so we can put them on our website so others can use but keep our company name on them for promotion purposes.

Obviosuly there is no point just creating the block with text on as explode is an easy way around this. Is there any way i can make a block non explodable for outside use? They are dynamic so should never need to be exploded.

So just wondering how can i lock a block as such so it can't be exploded!

Cheers,
Dan

[RobertB]

You might give CADLock a try.

Otherwise, there is not much you can do. You can set the block properties to prevent exploding, but nothing prevent others from doing the same to enable it. Also, preventing exploding the block does nothing to prevent someone from simply edting the block definition.

Face it, the effort to protect it isn't worth it. Even if you do protect it, someone can reverse engineer it rather easily.

[cadtag]

If it's for promotional purposes, then is there a convenient spot on the object that you can put the company name as a label? I've used various vendor supplied equipment blocks where that was done, certainly it's still possible to bleep out the name one way or another, but it served the purpose of advertising the product.

If you're interested more in tracking usage, then it would be possible to add a text string as xdata to each element in the block,,,,, IIRC a previous employer used a custom shx file for their standard font - basically a tweaked simplex, with one of the high numbered ascii characters being their name.