Category Archives: AutoCAD

Older AutoCAD loses (part of) the plot

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I know there are plenty of people still using AutoCAD 2007 and earlier, so this bug warning may save some of you some grief. I have no idea how widespread or isolated this problem is, but under some circumstances I haven’t worked out yet, AutoCAD 2007 fails to plot all of certain dynamic blocks. Some attributes have a habit of being plot-shy. Even if you don’t use dynamic blocks yourself, you could receive a set of drawings, check them on-screen, approve them, plot them and send out paper drawings without all of their parts. Unless you’re carefully manually checking the paper plots, this situation is obviously a little dangerous. Fortunately, Plot Preview also shows up the problem, so it is at least possible to check things without wasting trees.

Here’s an example. This is part of such a drawing displayed in AutoCAD 2007, with all of its parts in place. One of the dynamic blocks is highlighted:

Drawing in AutoCAD 2007 with all its parts in place

Here’s that drawing plotted using AutoCAD 2007, showing the missing parts:

Drawing plotted in AutoCAD 2007 with parts missing

Earlier releases do the same, including pre-dynamic block releases. As DWF files are just electronic plots, the same problem applies to them. Yes, I’ve checked for non-plotting layers and looked into the visibility states within the dynamic blocks. An audit of the drawing indicates no problems. Attribute visibility settings are not an issue.

Here’s the same drawing plotted using AutoCAD 2009 (2008 and 2010 are fine, too):

Drawing plotted in AutoCAD 2009 with parts intact

What to do? Using a later release would solve it, but might not be a practicable solution in your office right now. Instead, you could consider using DWG TrueView for your plotting. That may not be ideal either, but it could be better than risking the consequences of an unknown number of your plots containing an unknown number of missing parts in unknown places.

Have you come across this problem? If you have any more clues about the circumstances that trigger it, please add a comment.

AutoCAD 2010 – Will you miss the Menu Browser?

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I’ve closed the poll that asked AutoCAD 2009 users about their MENUBAR setting. It’s very clear that pull-down menus are still very much in use in the Ribboned world of post-2008 AutoCAD. In AutoCAD 2009, an attempt was made to provide access to pull-down menus without sacrificing that strip of screen real estate. That attempt was called the Menu Browser, it was one of the thing you could find under the Big Red A, and it really didn’t work very well. In AutoCAD 2010, the Menu Browser has gone away. The A hasn’t gone away, just the ability to access pull-down menus through it.

There are some who have expressed a deep dislike of the Big Red A, although it never offended me greatly. I just wished the features hidden under it worked better than they did in 2009. Personally, I generally prefer what’s under the A in 2010 than what’s there in 2009, but you may not. I know that when the 2009 user interface was being attacked, its most prominent defenders were those keyboard-heavy users who turned both the Ribbon and the menu bar off, giving themselves more screen space. On the infrequent occasions when a pull-down menu was required, those people were content to provide an extra click.

When I found out about the Menu Browser’s death a few months ago, I expected there would be a severe adverse reaction from such people. Maybe there will be one when people hold get the shipping product and notice it’s gone. But after my poll showed only 7% of respondents used it instead of the menu bar, I’m now expecting that adverse reaction to be smaller than I originally thought.

If you want to use AutoCAD 2010, want to work without a menu bar but still have access to menu items occasionally, what can you do? You can add a button to the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT), or any other toolbar, that toggles the menu bar on and off. Use the CUI command to add such a button.* The following macro will do the job:

'menubar $M=$(-,1,$(getvar,menubar))

There are a couple of downsides to this method. First, although this macro has been written in such a way that it should be transparent, it doesn’t currently work that way. When you push the button, AutoCAD will still cancel any command you’re in. Second, the screen resize forces a redraw, which could slow you down in very complex drawings. However, under most circumstances that redraw will still be quicker than waiting for a reaction from AutoCAD the first time you pick the Big Red A. By the way, that reaction time is better in 2010 than the very tardy 2009. As a result, even AutoCAD 2009 users might prefer to use the QAT-button method and forget the Menu Browser ever existed.

* If there is enough interest, I will do a video tutorial explaining how to add such a button to the QAT.

AutoCAD 2010 release date

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After my recent attendance at the AutoCAD 2010 launch, I have a few dozen subjects I’d like to blog about, lots of video editing to do, and not enough free time in which to do it. Many of my fellow launch-attending bloggers have beaten me to it with many of the meaty bits, but I’ll be covering much of that stuff in my own way and from my own perspective over the next few weeks.

One thing I can do with minimum effort is to pass on an important piece of information I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere yet: the date that Autodesk plans to actually ship AutoCAD 2010. That date is (drumroll)…

Tuesday, 24 March 2009

No great surprises there; the 12-month release cycle continues as usual.

Although this information was imparted to a room full of bloggers in an on-the-record session, I suspect it may have slipped out accidentally. It’s a planned date and may yet change subject to various circumstances. It applies to AutoCAD and probably AutoCAD LT; the vertical variants of AutoCAD will have later ship dates, probably in mid-April.

Interestingly, in a conversation with an Autodesk Australia person today, I was told that the 2010 launch dates are staggered across the globe. (That’s launch dates, not ship dates). So although everybody in Australia with an Internet connection already knows what’s in AutoCAD 2010, Autodesk Australia itself is apparently not allowed to disclose any information about it until Monday, 23 March 2009. That’s kind of bizarre if true, and I suspect it may be based on some kind of misunderstanding, but that’s what I was told.

Autodesk not listening? The response, part 1.

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While attending the AutoCAD 2010 launch today, I took the opportunity to interview three Autodesk people: Eric Stover, Jon Page and Shaan Hurley. I raised the issue of Autodesk being seen as not listening to its customers, and was given a very comprehensive response. Here is the first of two parts of that interview.

YouTube link.

Disclosure: Transport, accommodation and some meals were provided by Autodesk.

(Don’t) Ask Autodesk a question

If you had a real live Autodesk development person standing in front of you right now (an AutoCAD Product Manager, for example) and were allowed to ask one question, what would it be?

Please add a comment here with your question. I would ask that you keep your question civil and reasonably concise (one or two sentences), and bear in mind that the development person in front of you isn’t going to have a useful answer to policy questions about pricing, license agreements, customer service and so on. Other than that, anything goes, so let’s have ’em.

I can’t promise that your question will get answered, but I’ll see what I can do.

Note: comments are now closed, as this post keeps getting mistaken for an ongoing mechanism for asking Autodesk questions.

Adding Heidi

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Although I want to keep my list of links reasonably compact, it should not have taken until now to add the AutoCAD Insider blog of Autodesk’s Heidi Hewett to the list. Heidi’s idea of going through the AutoCAD alphabet is a great one, and I wish I had thought of it.

blog nauseam has been light on for AutoCAD tips and information lately. Although that’s going to change for the better soon, there’s plenty of that kind of stuff on Heidi’s blog to keep you amused in the meantime. It’s useful stuff for all AutoCAD users, explained well.

Oh, and Heidi, the Boundary command was (kind of) added in Release 12, except it was called Bpoly at the time. It was renamed to Boundary in Release 13. The Bpoly command lives on to this day, doing exactly the same as Boundary.

AutoCAD 2009 – Do you use the menu bar?

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You may have noticed that I’ve added a poll to find out if the AutoCAD 2009 users among you are using the menu bar (i.e. MENUBAR = 1). I’m also interested in hearing your comments about your usage and the reasons behind it.

If your menu bar turned on, why? Do you use it all the time or do you just need it for those less-frequently-used commands that you don’t have handy at your fingertips, on toolbars, palettes or the Ribbon? Do you need it because your own custom routines are on menus, or third-party commands? Does the vertical AutoCAD variant you’re using need it?

If your menu bar is turned off, why? Do you never have any need for the stuff in there? Do you use the Menu Browser instead, sacrificing an occasional extra click for the sake of a permanent strip of screen space?

How well cooked is the average major new AutoCAD feature these days?

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I’ve now closed the poll that asks this question, and the results show a typical bell-curve shape with the peak clearly on “Half-baked”. There is a slight bias to the bottom end, but not a significant one.

This result doesn’t surprise me, as I’ve seen and heard a lot of user comments to that effect, and I’ve made such comments myself.  I’m not saying that this poll is definitive proof of anything, but it sits pretty well with my perception of what AutoCAD users generally think.

Now I’d like you to consider a related question. If we accept for the sake of argument that the average major new AutoCAD feature is half-baked, is that necessarily a bad thing? There are some valid arguments that can be made for pushing out features before they are complete. I’ll examine the pros and cons from my perspective later, but for now I’d like to hear from you.  What do you think?

Leech marketing by IMSI – Part 2 – A/CAD

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The IMSI free CAD product that it is putting up against AutoCAD LT has a very interesting name: A/CAD LT*. Does A/CAD sound familiar to anyone? I vaguely seem to remember some other CAD product with a very similar name. Hmm, let me think, it has a main program file called acad.exe and many other support files called acad.something, it has had its name abbreviated to ACAD by its users for decades… No, sorry, the name somehow eludes me.

I’m not a trademark lawyer (or any other sort), but here’s what I can tell from a quick glance at the USPTO site. It appears that Autodesk had ACAD registered as a trademark in 1986 with a first use in 1983, and that the registration was abandoned in 1987. It was registered again in 1988 and abandoned again in 1992. That may be an unfortunate lapse. I wonder what else may have slipped through the cracks?

Now there is an ACAD logo design registered to a certain ACAD Corporation of California (possibly unrelated), and a trademark application from IMSI, not yet approved. IMSI owns, and is actively using, the acadnow.com domain name. The IMSI advertising materials show the word A/CAD with a little TM after it, which indicates that they are claiming that they own the trademark, but it is not registered. The A/CAD packaging is, to me, rather too close to the style of the AutoCAD packaging. There’s even a Big Red A. Oh, sorry, it’s actually a big white A on a red background. That makes all the difference.

Given Autodesk’s history in using the courts to chase quarry as elusive as an unregisterable file extension that it never actually owned, and having a legal prod at competitors who dare to use orange rectangles in their marketing, what do you think are the chances that Autodesk’s hyperactive legal department is going to let this one slip by without a fight?

IMSI, if you’re going to compete, great. All power to you. But compete, don’t leech; it looks awful. Tacky, tacky, tacky.

While you might get some cheap** publicity (including from me), I’m afraid you miss out on the underdog sympathy factor when it looks like you’re actively trying to get sued. Finally, did you consider what happens when somebody tries to find your A/CAD product using Google? Didn’t think so.

* A/CAD LT Express is the full name of the currently marketed version.
** Excluding legal fees.

I haven’t seen AutoCAD 2010…

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…yet.

That means I’m free to speculate about it in public. There have already been a few hints dropped here and there. Stronger 3D, parametric 3D? Does that just mean adding the missing 3rd dimension to dynamic blocks, or more? What else?

If you’re in the right spot at the right time at Autodesk University, you will probably find out a lot more. In the meantime, I’d be interested to hear your speculation about what’s going to be in 2010, and find out what you’d like to be in it. Also, what don’t you want to see?

Please add your comments, but not if it involves breaking a non-disclosure agreement. I’m hoping to hear from people who don’t know what’s in 2010, because I think that would be an interesting exercise, particularly with the benefit of hindsight in a few months’ time.

AutoCAD 2009 Subscription Pack 2 – PDF Enhancements

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Subscription customers of plain AutoCAD 2009 can log on to the Subscription Center and download Subscription Pack 2. This pack improves PDF output (long overdue and very welcome) and adds the ability to attach PDF files. That’s welcome too, but is of largely academic interest right now because of a total lack of interoperability. Unless you only ever provide your drawing files to people who also have plain AutoCAD 2009 with Subscription Pack 2, they won’t see the PDF underlay. However, round tripping is supported, so when you get the drawing back the PDF underlay will reappear.

Here is a brief summary of the features, taken direct from the download page:

PDF Underlays
Now you can import PDF files, attaching them as PDF underlays. Once you attach a PDF underlay, you can use a variety of tools to snap to lines and objects, control the display of layers, move, scale, rotate, and clip the PDF underlay.

PDF Output
Key improvements have been made for publishing PDF files. File sizes have been reduced, making it easier to share designs. TrueType font support has been added, giving you control over precisely how your fonts are displayed.

This bonus pack is only available in English for AutoCAD® 2009, although, if desired, it can be installed on localized versions of AutoCAD 2009. If installed on a localized version of AutoCAD 2009, all new and related commands display in English only.

As usual, read the readme first, which contains much fuller descriptions of the new features.

AutoCAD 2009 – An outsider’s look at the Ribbon

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Kirill Grouchnikov is a developer who has a blog called Pushing Pixels. This wouldn’t normally be of particular interest to AutoCAD users, but he recently wrote a piece describing the AutoCAD 2009 Ribbon. It is always interesting to things described from a different perspective, in this case the Ribbon from a non-user’s point of view. He pays particular attention to the ways in which the AutoCAD Ribbon differs from Microsoft’s standards. As a non-user, he has skipped lightly over several aspects of AutoCAD Ribbon use, including some drawbacks of the current implementation, but it is still a worthwhile read, as are some of the comments that follow.

A true AutoCAD teaching story

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Reading Ralph’s post about going back to teaching reminded me of a time some years ago when I taught some AutoCAD evening classes at a technical college. As Ralph points out, students have a wide range of abilities. Although they were all supposed to have completed a prerequisite introductory Windows course, it became apparent that during that course at least some of them must have been absent in mind if not in body.

Here’s an example, where I was explaining to the class how it was possible to modify toolbars.

Steve: “Move your mouse pointer over any toolbar button and right-click on it.”

Student: “Nothing’s happening.”

Steve: “You should see a menu appear with the word Customize on it. When it appears, left-click on that word.”

Student: “There’s no menu on my computer.”

Steve: “Did you hover over a toolbar button and right-click on it?”

Student: “Yes, and nothing happens. Do I need to press Enter?”

Steve: “No.”

Student: (Presses Enter anyway) “It says Unknown command.”

Steve: (Going over to see what’s going on) “Can you please show me what you’re doing?”

The student did so. I returned to the front of the class.

Steve: “If you haven’t already done so, hover the mouse pointer over any toolbar button, press down the right-hand mouse button and release it.”

The student had been hovering over the button and typing C-L-I-C-K. After all, I had told him to write “CLICK” on it.

50 years of LISP

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It is difficult to find an exact date for LISP’s birthday. It wasn’t so much born in an instant as it was gradually dragged out of the primordial slime during the heady days of late 50s computer research. What is known is that John McCarthy, LISP’s “father”, published a report in October 1958 about his new programming language aimed at providing artificial intelligence capabilities on the IBM 704 mainframe computer. That report, one of a series, was the first one to use the name LISP.

OOPSLA, a major annual conference on object-oriented programming, has decided to celebrate LISP’s 50th birthday on 20 October 2008. Practically everyone at that event is likely to be smarter, geekier and possibly even more pedantic than me. So for now I’m going to go with that date and raise a glass to LISP and John McCarthy in one week’s time.

John Walker’s almost-accidental but still inspired decision to add LISP to AutoCAD was, in my opinion, the most significant feature addition in AutoCAD’s history. There were many other feature additions without which AutoCAD would be a joke (e.g. blocks, undo/redo, dimensioning, polylines) but they were always going to happen anyway.

Adding LISP wasn’t like that. It wasn’t inevitable. It was an excellent example of Walker thinking outside the box, and it was the one thing that raised AutoCAD significantly above its competitors (yes, it had serious competitors once) at a time when the PC CAD market was still up for grabs.

The genius of this move was that instead of attempting to fill AutoCAD’s many feature holes, Autodesk could provide the tools that would let the users do that for themselves. The language was an ideal fit for a number of reasons, and users in droves started hole-filling with a vengeance. Without that boost to AutoCAD’s open architecture, the PC CAD market would have been a very different place. Autodesk itself may not even have survived into the 1990s, and I could have been writing this blog about Versacad, Computervision, or some other competitor.

Today, despite an unfortunate history of long periods of neglect from Autodesk, LISP remains the language of choice for most of my AutoCAD-related programming needs. There are exceptions, but I’ll usually first see if a given job can be done in LISP. If it can’t be done easily and well in LISP, then I will consider using one of the other available languages. For the sort of work I usually do, that doesn’t happen very often.

Why? I’ll explain my reasoning in a later post.

How complete are most new AutoCAD features?

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You may have noticed the poll on the right asking “How well cooked is the average major new AutoCAD feature these days?” Despite the rather frivolous nature of the question and choices, there is a serious side to the question so please let me know what you think.

Note that this doesn’t address the question of how well cooked new features should be, just how well cooked they are. There’s an argument that can be made in support of releasing features before they are honed to perfection, and I will be covering that issue in later posts.

AutoCAD performance and productivity

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I have closed the performance and productivity polls as described in my posts here and here, and the results can be seen in the Polls Archive. As with most of the other polls I’ve run here, the distribution of votes has not changed greatly after the first few days.

It is clear from the very different voting patterns in the two polls that blog nauseam readers are smart enough understand the difference between the two questions. The performance poll has a very clear skew to the “slower” side. This supports the empirical evidence I’ve seen elsewhere that people perceive AutoCAD as getting slower. This is stuff they’ve noticed for themselves, not a few milliseconds here and there.

On the other hand, the productivity poll results show a much more even distribution. The five options are pretty equally represented, except that “a lot more productive” has suffered at the hands of the most popular choice, “a bit more productive”. If you calculate the mean result, it is almost bang in the middle. It’s actually slightly worse than that, but by such a very small margin that it is not statistically significant.

Overall, we can say that the average viewpoint expressed here is that people clearly see AutoCAD as getting slower, but that its productivity has stayed about the same. So, does this let Autodesk off the performance hook? If a slowing AutoCAD is balanced by productivity-enhancing features, does performance matter? In my opinion, the answers to those questions are no and yes respectively.

It’s not a safe assumption that productivity features are balancing speed issues for everybody across the board. A new feature may help some users’ productivity, maybe even a majority of users, but it won’t help everybody. Some new features even harm some people’s productivity, which is one more reason for being grateful that Autodesk generally lets us turn them off (although it has been forgetful about that in some cases in recent years). Performance is one of the many things that impact productivity, but unlike most new features, is something that impacts the productivity of everybody. Even a first-time user has to sit around waiting for AutoCAD to start up, while a fast power user will be rendered less productive, and certainly more frustrated, by relatively small hesitations.

Furthermore, if AutoCAD is about as productive as it was a few releases back, is that good enough? Or should Autodesk be providing noticeably more productivity in return for our Subscription or upgrade payments? If not, why do we continue to hand over our hard-earned dollars? Why do we go through the upgrade process at all, with all its attendant costs, struggles and inconveniences?

Autodesk, please put much more effort into halting and reversing AutoCAD’s performance slide. It doesn’t have to be a competition between performance and productivity. Improve the former and the latter will also improve.

Autodesk on-line survey

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As posted on Between the Lines, there is an Autodesk survey you may wish to complete in an attempt to have some kind of influence over AutoCAD’s future direction. Among other things, you will be asked specific questions about these issues:

  • Interoperability
  • Batch Processing in AutoCAD
  • Custom Linetype Creator
  • Custom Hatch Creator
  • Transparent Fills

You will also be asked to rank 10 possible future features:

  • Batch process drawings in AutoCAD
  • Draw order by layer
  • Enhanced visual styles
  • Visual compare two drawings
  • 3D Dynamic Blocks
  • Transparent hatch fills
  • Convert PDF to DWG
  • 3D enhancements
  • Hatch Pattern Generator
  • Linetype Creator

Without knowing more details, it’s hard to make a rational choice. For example, does “Enhanced visual styles” mean that AutoCAD 2007’s nearly-done 3D display overhaul will be finished off, allowing the correct display and plotting of simple conventional mechanical engineering views with hidden lines? Because that would make it important and worth me pushing it up the list. Or does it mean something more glossy but much less useful, which from my point of view would push it near the bottom? Who knows?

Never mind, I encourage you to have a go anyway. All you can do is your best based on the available information and hope it isn’t misinterpreted based on faulty assumptions. There’s a box near the end that allows you free rein to say what you like about AutoCAD’s future direction. I hope many of you use it, and I hope Autodesk doesn’t just “listen”, but acts based on what its customers say they want.