Trace a new drawing from another drawing

[Vigilante]

Here is a funky question, wonder if there is way to do this.

Let's say I have a really wacky drawing with lots of blocks, minserted blocks, strange objects that I don't have, etc...
And let's say all I want to do is have that entire drawing, as-is, but using just lines, plines, whatever. In other words, no blocks, no xrefs, no objects, no fancy stuff at all, just basically a "trace over" of what the drawing looks like.

So the end result would be a new drawing where every line is just a line. Not part of xrefs, blocks, 3d/2d objects etc...

Also it would be good if this somehow were to make the new lines/traces into the same layer as the line it is tracing. But I suppose it could all go in the same layer if needs be.

Does that make sense? It would be a really helpful function to just have a new tracing of another drawing, sans all the fancy stuff.

Part of the reason for needing this is that drawings with blocks and minserted blocks are extremely hard to edit. Let's say I have a wall which is a block. If I explode the wall, suddenly window and door locations are lost because they used some special objects or something. If a wall/door/fixture/whatever happens to be minserted, I can't edit it at all because I can't explode it. If I try to get around it, it's just a long, complicated and painful process.
So if I had a script which just traced all the lines in the model tab to a new document that has none of those things, it would make editing a million times easier.

Thanks for your help!

[CarlB]

You might trw "wmfout" and "wmfin" although you may lose too much information or accuracy that way.

[Norts]

would using dwf work ?

[Vigilante]

I will try those things and see what happens.

Thanks, stay tuned....

[fahim108]

...or you can even qselect the text in the drawing (mtext particularly), delete it, explode the rest of the drawing a couple of times, then use the oops command to bring back the deleted mtext. Select all, put in one layer, or whatever!

Just don't know if XREF would explode like a BLOCK though! ...but worth giving a try.