adding lengths of multiple lines for cut list

Gday all.

I am currently designing formwork for a concrete company, where i have lengths of varying length and witdh a ply wood all over the drawing that i have to add up a cutting list for the factory to cut the ply.

i have been drawing the planks of wood in differing colour and thickness polylines and going through the drawing and individually clicking on the lines to get the length and adding them up.

can anyone please suggest a faster process?

say getting the total length of all polylines on the same layer perhaps?

cheers

Marcus

If you were on 2008 or later....you could use the ._dataextraction command... with this you can make a table and update it when other entities are added or removed.

Since you are on 2007, the easiest way may be to download TLEN.LSP from http://www.turvill.com/t2/free_stuff/index.htm and run it. You can isolate a layer, run the routine and get your total.

thanks mate

Ok i opened the link and it presented me with lisp file code.

i copied and pasted that into a notepad and saved it as tlen.lsp

i then did appload and loaded it.

now i type tlen or tlen.lsp in the command line and i get the following

Command: tlen Unknown command "TLEN". Press F1 for help.

am i doing something wrong? its been a few years since i have played with lisp routines

Funny, but I clicked on the link and just downloaded the lisp file to my Desktop. Then once in AutoCAD I used Appload to load the routine. At the command line I then typed tlen. I was asked to select the objects (in my test it was three short lines) and when I was done I pressed the Enter key. An AutoCAD Message appearred that read Total length of selected objects is 9.9675.

There was no reason to copy/paste any code and resave it as tlen.lsp that I could see. When you used Appload did it report back that it had successfully loaded the routine?

Since TLEN is not an AutoCAD command pressing F1 for Help would have done you no good as you found out.

I think you need to try again. Remember, all you need do is find, download, and load the code. No cutting, pasting or saving required on your part.

There was no reason to copy/paste any code and resave it as tlen.lsp that I could see.

 

I think you need to try again. Remember, all you need do is find, download, and load the code. No cutting, pasting or saving required on your part.

In some browsers, clicking the link opens the code in the browser as ASCII text. So in that case, there is nothing wrong with copying and pasting into Notepad, then saving as a LSP file.

i copied and pasted that into a notepad and saved it as tlen.lsp

In some windows versions, I have seen notepad automatically add a "TXT" file extension to any file saved. I wonder if your file is really named "tlen.lsp.txt", and if that would even load in AutoCAD...?

Instead of left clicking on the link, right click on it and choose "Save Target As" (or something like that) to download the actual file itself.

In some browsers, clicking the link opens the code in the browser as ASCII text.

That was something I was unaware of. I'm sure I would have come across it as I use three different browsers (Explorer, Opera and Foxfire). Thanks for the info.

I could see where saving the file with a txt file extension could happen then. But I would expect AutoCAD to respond that Appload failed. Maybe the OP missed that message.

 

That was something I was unaware of. I'm sure I would have come across it as I use three different browsers (Explorer, Opera and Foxfire). Thanks for the info.

Firefox and Chrome displays the code in the browser.

IE8 asks me to open or save.

cheers guys, i just opened it on Internet explorer, saved it to desktop and apploaded it, it worked.

thanks so much for all your help.

much appreciated.

Alls well that ends well.

Glad to hear you got it to work. Thanks for updating us.

Alls well that ends well.

 

Glad to hear you got it to work. Thanks for updating us.

I had the same issue. This is what I do to get lisp routines that are just text on the screen instead of a download file. I copy it from the screen,then find an old lisp routine in my computer folder that I know works and save it as the new one. Then erase all the text and paste into that file. It usually works. I have had trouble creating new lisp routines because something happens to the format. But that method almost always works for those of us who don't write lisp routines.