counting of symbols on a drawing - ie detectors etc

[Justhe1]

Hi all,

Posted on AutoLisp forum on recomendation:

2nd post and complete CAD newbie, so be gentle please..!

Although not a CAD operator myself (but am now starting to learn) as I am regularly involved in large projects which have many drawings with different layers showing various electrical services symbols (such as smoke detectors and the like) on them.

Rather than having to manually count these objects is there any way our CAD man (who doesn't know the answer to this question either ) can select the desired symbol, select an area on the drawing or the whole drawing itself and effectively get AutoCAD LT 2000 to "count" the number of those objects on that drawing...

Just wondered as I just had to manually tick off 12000 items over 27 drawings - and there MUST be a quicker/easier/less painfull way of acheiving this!!


Thanks in advance,

J

[roter]

probably every symbol is under a particular layer, if so you can isolate put the other layers OFF or THAW them (it dipends on construction of symbols), When you have them isolated,you select them and look on the commmand line to see how many symbols you have selected.
This is not a safe system becouse if there are forgotten lines, points, etcetera on the same layer as symbols, an you dont see them, you count them. but if drawing was well constructed, it should work.

[CADTutor]

Of course, if you had full AutoCAD rather than LT, you (or someone else) could easily write a LISP routine to count the blocks/symbols for you. If you have to do this a lot, it would be worth the cost of an upgrade.

[Kate M]

Look into QSELECT.

[CADTutor]

Good point Kate. If you use the selection filter to select all blocks of a particular name, you will be able to see how many of them there are. See the Advanced Selection tutorial for details.

[Justhe1]

Thanks for the help all, will give all of the above a go (or at least inform our CAD man!)...

J

[hyposmurf]

How about BCOUNT?If the items are on blocks it will tell your how many of each block occurs.

[Kate M]

BCOUNT's an express tool...sure do wish they worked in LT...

[hyposmurf]

I guess your doomed! .Did the usual thing of looking at my posts in hurry at lunch missed the LT bit!Have you got a full version at all anywhere in your office Justhe 1?Maybe the user or you can use the BCOUNT command