CAD: Keep Your Drawings Clean As a Whistle While You Draft ...

We take a look at two cleanup applications from Autodesk to speed up your drawing performance.

Here at Kung Fu Drafter we are forever fighting the war against decreased workstation performance. Whether it is due to a virus or iTunes each and every threat to processing speed must be investigated, interrogated and eradicated. Even if it happens that the threat falls somewhere between the keyboard and the chair. In those cases we apprehend the wayward drafter and take them to our Kung Fu Detention Center. Fortunately we do not often have to make CAD Manager’s arrests. But that is neither here nor there.

Very often the key to increased performance for a CAD workstation is drawing maintenance. A little cleaning here and a little tweaking there and before you know it, things are zooming along. Fortunately Autodesk has developed several tools to help CAD professionals squeeze that extra bit of performance out of a workstation.

Of course there are the Purge, Audit and Recover commands, all of which help. But for those extra difficult drawing files you may need more. Again, Autodesk has provided CAD professionals with the tools for the job.

Autodesk's AutoCAD 2010 ...

Last week Autodesk released two new cleanup tools for improving drawing performance for AutoCAD 2010 based products. First there is the Regapp ID Cleanup Utility for AutoCAD 2010. One of the hidden complications of AutoCAD based products lies in the process of deleting objects from drawings. In this case Autodesk’s Readme.txt describes the issue as follows:

“When you delete an object with Extended Entity Data (xdata), a regapp ID remains in the application ID (APPID) symbol table. When a file contains excess unreferenced regapp IDs, performance may be negatively affected.”

With this nifty little application drafters with be able to remove these unreferenced regapps IDs from drawings files. In large, complex drawing files removing these errant IDs can make a noticeable difference. But what about drawings that are lagging but don’t seem to be overly complex?

Along with the above application Autodesk also released the Scale List Cleanup for AutoCAD 2010 based products and DWG TrueView 2010. This application solves a problem of extraneous scale listings. Extra scale listings, especially in nested external references, can have a definite impact of a drawings performance. According to Autodesk:

“When a file contains excess scales, performance may be negatively affected. Eventually, the file may become unusable. To use the file, some scales must be removed. This utility repairs affected files by removing excess scales.”

Both of these cleanup applications are must haves for any CAD professional. As always, be certain to download and read the ReadMe.txt files for full descriptions and instructions before using these applications. We know that we are going to head to the office tomorrow for a full day of cleaning and speeding up. That or we will just stay home and play Left 4 Dead. We haven’t really decided yet ...

- KFD -