Dimension Styles

I work in a small office of about 5 people who use AutoCAD. I am the main draftsman but the other people in the office will draft from time to time as well. We have a detail library that we use for our typical details. We have been building this library for about 10 years. As you can imagine, over the years our dimension styles have been updated and changed "to better our drawings". Our updates occur very, very frequently. People here seem to think that we can "better our drawings" about once every 2 months. That's a whole different issue...

Anyways... the problem is that while we update our dimension styles we do not update our details in the process. So we have details that have dimension styles that we have not used in 5-10 years... We are currently in the process trying to build another master library that only uses the current dimension styles. The problem is is that I am the only one in the office that truly understands how this works. Now when people copy and paste old details in it is bringing in old dimension styles. The linear dimensions, aligned dimensions, radial dimensions, etc. sometimes update to the correct style but if the dimension style name from the drawing the detail is being copied from is named even slightly different than the name of the dimension style of the drawing the detail is being pasted in it creates a whole new dimension style. (IE: Drawing detail is copied from Dim Style Name = "Standard 3-4"; Drawing detail is being pasted in Dim Style Name = "Standard3-4") Leaders are somewhat similar to dimensions. The Leader Lines that is... The leader text will never come in correctly even if the dimension style names are exactly the same. As a Leader Text is not actually recognized as a "Dimension" it is only an "MText" item.

As you can imagine, as I am trying to update our library and make everything consistently uniform it is almost impossible when you have 5 other guys pasting details in from god knows where...

So to the point... My question is, is there someway that I can block dimension styles from being imported and block it to only allow dimension styles that are already in the drawing to be used? If this is not possible does anyone have any other solutions that may be helpful to me? You have no idea how frustrating it is to try to do something like this only to have someone else mess up the entire process.

Thank you for your help in advance and if you have any questions please feel free to ask me.

Enforcing standards has been an age old battle in any office that has more than one person preparing drawings whether that is "on the board" or utilizing CAD.

Perhaps EDMSCHK is the answer. Lynn Allen, of AutoDesk fame says:

"Using this powerful but little-known function, you can check any AutoCAD file for standards compliance -- and even automatically fix nonstandard styles."

Take a look at the video "Let AutoCAD check your standards"

If the video is not featured when you get at the webpage just choose it from the several offered in the section labelled Lynn Allen's Tips and Tricks.

http://video.cadalyst.com/?&fr_story=918f768c1fead5a81f4cd9ca9b291ccbbd71fcf4

I hope there is something there to make your job a little easier in the future. Good luck.

Enforcing standards has been an age old battle in any office that has more than one person preparing drawings whether that is "on the board" or utilizing CAD.

 

Perhaps EDMSCHK is the answer. Lynn Allen, of AutoDesk fame says:

 

"Using this powerful but little-known function, you can check any AutoCAD file for standards compliance -- and even automatically fix nonstandard styles."

 

Take a look at the video "Let AutoCAD check your standards"

If the video is not featured when you get at the webpage just choose it from the several offered in the section labelled Lynn Allen's Tips and Tricks.

 

http://video.cadalyst.com/?&fr_story=918f768c1fead5a81f4cd9ca9b291ccbbd71fcf4

 

I hope there is something there to make your job a little easier in the future. Good luck.

I would make a lisp for current standard dymstyle, able to load any required scale... Check attached... then load a scale ... apply it to all selected details.. and then purge the drawing completely several times to get rid of unused dimstyles.... that may help you.

attached lsp is for metric units... and spanish.. but it will update your text style, text height, ltscale, dimscale.. and will save each new created dimstyle with its own name according to selected scale... you can make your own based on this one, I guess you just need a few days to fully understand all the dim variables.

also... I uploaded another stand.lsp for english units dimstyles, and another std1.lsp for general setup.

STD.zip

std1.lsp

Stand.LSP