ctb mapping utility

[kevinholmes]

Has anyone ever come across a utility that takes an input drawing (generated by a land surveyor for example) and change the drawing colours etc by mapping the input ctb to the your company ctb.

I hope I'm explaining what I'm looking for. I'm not a programmer but it seems to me that it should be easy to do. For example if the surveyor uses green to plot as a 0.1mm line and we use it to plot as .7mm and red as .1mm the proposed utility would change all green lines in the file to red and so on.

I know there are work arounds manually particularly if all colours are set bylayer. But it would involve opening and noting the contents of the input ctb and manually changing each property.

[ccowgill]

Has anyone ever come across a utility that takes an input drawing (generated by a land surveyor for example) and change the drawing colours etc by mapping the input ctb to the your company ctb.

I hope I'm explaining what I'm looking for. I'm not a programmer but it seems to me that it should be easy to do. For example if the surveyor uses green to plot as a 0.1mm line and we use it to plot as .7mm and red as .1mm the proposed utility would change all green lines in the file to red and so on.

I know there are work arounds manually particularly if all colours are set bylayer. But it would involve opening and noting the contents of the input ctb and manually changing each property.

I think I understand what you are referring to, it sounds like you would like to change the color of objects in a drawing based on comparing your standard ctb file with a ctb file from another company, so when you use your ctb file, everything prints out using your company's standard lineweights (did I get it, or did I just confuse you). The way our office does it (as we have both surveyors and engineers) is we established a company wide standard for layer names, then we created 2 programs, one that sets all the layers to the the Survey dept linetypes and colors, and one that sets all the layers to the Engineering dept linetypes and colors. It is a time consuming process to set it up in the first place, but the amount of time it saves later on in the process is well worth it.

(command "LAYER"
    "COLOR" "1"
    "Prop Bridge,Prop Easement,Prop Lots,Prop Slope Stake,Grading Permits,Prop Contours,Prop Drive,Prop Road,Prop Road CL" "")

we only use the first 7 colors, so it isnt too terribly complicated, if you use more than that, your program could get long, we do however have 185 standard layers.

[RobertB]

You could perform a layer translation. Read up on it in the help files.

[kevinholmes]

Thanks to both of you I think the Laytrans method will work best for us as the surveyors are external and various.

It just proves that a lot of the time the functionality requested is in AutoCAD its just hard to find if you don't use the right search term