HED Project

Life/Tech/Ideas

Tag: drafting

  • Save And Close All Open AutoCAD Drawings

    Save And Close All Open AutoCAD Drawings

    Recently, I found myself having 10-15 AutoCAD drawings open at the same time and wanted to close them all.

    An easy way to do it is with two commands.

    To do so, first you type SAVEALL at AutoCAD’s command line and all the open documents are saved. Secondly, the CLOSEALL command follows that will close all the open drawings.

    But… I wanted something more automated. So I wrote a small script that combines those two commands into one that will automatically save and close all the drawings.

    Here’s the script:

    (defun c:SCALL ()
  (command "SAVEALL")
  (command "CLOSEALL")
  (princ)
)

    That’s all. The file is named SCALL.lsp and the command to run it is also “scall” typed at the command line of AutoCAD.

    If you want to know how to load an AutoLISP script in AutoCAD you can read this small article that teaches you step by step what you should do.

  • ProgeCAD 2020 is here and is the best version so far

    progeCAD_box_2020_ENGDue to my last job demands, I was searching for an alternative to AutoCAD that could do the same job. Between many different choices I had, one caught my eye. It was the ProgeCAD that I have written about before.

    As we were part of iCare, a help desk program from ProgeCAD, we could receive (and still do) 24/7 help for one year. In addition to these for one year we could have all the updates for the program. So far so good. But for my surprise, last month we also received the latest version of the software, the ProgeCAD 2020. (more…)

  • ProgeCAD – A true AutoCAD alternative

    As Estimator/QS I often have the need for quick and accurate measurements. The main tools I use are AutoCAD and MS Excel.

    As it is well known Autodesk stopped selling AutoCAD as a program and it charges it as a service. That means that every year you have to pay an amount to Autodesk to use its service. It is a trend the latest years and the result is that the user doesn’t own the program if he/she decides to stop paying for the service.

    That led me to search for an AutoCAD aternative that could be user friendly to an AutoCAD user, would have the same commands and the almost the same interface. Also, I was searching for a program that supported native DWG files to be sure that I would not have any conflict with files produced from AutoCAD.

    There were many programs that I tried (ie BricsCAD, NanoCAD etc) but decided to stick with ProgeCAD for many reasons. (more…)

  • 5 Great AutoLISP Scripts

    I decided to post my favorite AutoLISP programs that I use extensively hoping that someone will find them useful. The two of them (as you can see in the code that I am providing) are written by me and their coding is very easy to understand and changed/tweaked (if someone has a bit of knowledge about AutoLISP). There are other two without their code provided by their authors but they are great (.vlx extension). Scripts can also be downloaded all together from here. (more…)