Learner Drawer Posted May 29, 2012 Share Posted May 29, 2012 Hi folks. Sorry if this has been asked before but I've had a good search and can't find anything that appears to be the same. I have several thousand drawings that have been provided from various sources. It has become obvious that there have been gaps in the QA process in the past and not all suppliers have used the supplied ctb files. This is causing an issue when creating some PDFs (automatically through a document management system) as, unless we go into every drawing and manually update the ctb file, the colours are not what we are needing. We have also found that some of the CTB files defined in drawings have either not been provided to us, or have been deleted over the years so we do not know what has been used. Is there any way to: programmatically change the ctb on all drawings? list the ctb files in use so we can report on it and see how big an issue it is? force the drawing to use the supplied ctb file regardless of the one that has been defined within the drawing? Hopefully this makes sense - I've not been involved with drawings for long and am more a "process" type of person. Thanks in advance. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dadgad Posted May 29, 2012 Share Posted May 29, 2012 Welcome to the forum. This sounds like a job for LEE MAC, I took a look on his site and did not see any ready made solutions for your problem, but I suggest you visit http://www.lee-mac.com/index.html and consider contacting him, regarding the possibility of his assisting you with your problem. Perhaps somebody else has something available which might sort you out, but barring that, Lee does great work. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pablo Ferral Posted May 29, 2012 Share Posted May 29, 2012 Here's some answers! Is there any way to:programmatically change the ctb on all drawings ? - Yes, using a batch script, Lisp, Visual Lisp, VBA, VB.net, C - you name it. I suggest that you pick your weapon of choice and post about it in the programming section. List the ctb files in use so we can report on it and see how big an issue it is? - You could investigate using the AutoCAD standards tools to investigate each file as it comes in and generate a report to send back to your subcontractors with a list of things to be fixed. You can automate this with the batch standards checker. Check out this article by Robert Green: http://www.cadalyst.com/management/standards-enforcement-tools-13098 force the drawing to use the supplied ctb file regardless of the one that has been defined within the drawing? - Yes, probably the easiest way to do this is to include the drawings in a sheet set and then use the sheet sets own page set-up override to plot your drawings. If you can afford it - you could easily get someone to roll all this up into a custom script. If you can attract the attention of Lee Mac, you will be golden, he is a clever guy. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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