Category Archives: CAD Management

Why every AutoCAD CAD Manager should have a copy of BricsCAD – part 2, 3D operations

This is the second post in this series where I explain why this statement holds true:

As a CAD Manager looking after AutoCAD users, or a power user looking after yourself, it’s worth your while to have a copy of BricsCAD handy.

This post is about using BricsCAD to do things to help out your AutoCAD users who are having problems with 3D operations. Why would you bother using BricsCAD to mess with AutoCAD 3D models? Because sometimes AutoCAD can’t do stuff with them, and BricsCAD can.

If you have a user who finally asks for help after fighting AutoCAD for ages trying to get an operation to work such as an awkward fillet, a self-intersecting extrusion or a direct edit that doesn’t want to move, you have a couple of options:

fight the same fight yourself in AutoCAD, eventually discover that the user was right, and then construct an excruciatingly awkward workaround; or
fire up BricsCAD and see if you can do it there. There’s a good chance it will. If it does, hand the DWG back to the user with a smug look on your face. If it doesn’t, construct an awkward workaround in BricsCAD, because it will almost certainly be faster than doing the same thing in AutoCAD. Direct editing of 3D solids is more flexible and easier in BricsCAD; the Quad Cursor helps a lot.

I’ve been writing a client-specific AutoCAD 3D training course recently, and going through the exercises I’ve developed has been instructive. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve thought, “Man, this would have been so much easier in BricsCAD.” That’s before we get to the 3D parametrics that BricsCAD has had for a while and which AutoCAD never will.

Why is BricsCAD so much better than AutoCAD at making 3D work well? Because it has to be. When you base your entire product line (including BIM, parametric 3D, sheet metal and a host of other uses covered by 3rd party developers) on a single DWG-based 3D engine, that engine has to be robust, powerful, efficient and fast.

It’s not as if Bricsys can say to somebody struggling with performing 3D operations in BricsCAD that they should be using Inventor or Revit instead. That cop-out is unavailable. It has to just work.

Fortunately, Bricsys has acquired a small group of genius-level experts in this area, and holds on to them rather than dumping them when they get too experienced. It shows. Overwhelmingly, it just works.

It will cost you a few minutes to download and install of an evaluation BricsCAD and confirm this for yourself. It’s well worth it.

There are exceptions, of course. Nothing is perfect, and you will come across the occasional glitch. But those exceptions are definitely rarer than in AutoCAD. My experience also tells me that if you report those exceptions, there’s an extremely good chance that they will be fixed, and quickly. Bricsys ain’t Autodesk.

Why every AutoCAD CAD Manager should have a copy of BricsCAD – part 1, fixing drawings

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Here’s a mega-tip with a lot of experience behind it:

As a CAD Manager looking after AutoCAD users, or a power user looking after yourself, it’s worth your while to have a copy of BricsCAD handy.

Why? There are too many reasons to fit in one blog post, so I’m going to do a mini-series. The first post is about using BricsCAD to fix up drawings that are giving your AutoCAD users problems.

One of the things that surprised me most when evaluating BricsCAD as a potential replacement for AutoCAD was that my expectations were wrong when it came to the reliability of opening DWGs. Over the years, I collected a variety of DWGs that gave various releases of AutoCAD some problems. Some of those problems occurred while performing some kind of editing or processing, while others prevented AutoCAD from opening the drawing at all. I was expecting BricsCAD to have all those problems, plus perhaps some additional incompatibilities of its own.

What happened was the opposite. I don’t think I came across a single drawing that AutoCAD could open but BricsCAD couldn’t. On the contrary, BricsCAD was much more forgiving than AutoCAD, breezing through the process of opening drawings that had problems that originated in AutoCAD. Maybe 80-90% of my “problem” drawings were problems for AutoCAD alone. In many cases an AUDIT in BricsCAD and a re-save was enough to make the problem go away in AutoCAD. In other cases I could use BricsCAD to recover the unrecoverable using the traditional methods of WBLOCK, saving as an earlier release, saving as DXF, binary search (I may do a later post on exactly what that means), and so on.

Note that you may be able to obtain similar results using other DWG-based products such as DraftSight, ZWCAD or even the free BricsCAD Shape. However, I don’t have the experience with those products to be able to confirm that. Autodesk’s DWG TrueView, being a cut-down AutoCAD, tends to have the same problems as AutoCAD.

One thing that was particularly pleasant about using BricsCAD to fix problem drawings was the speed at which it could be done, because of BricsCAD’s generally superior performance. Closing and opening AutoCAD is painfully slow these days as the bloat gets worse, so having a product that fires up quickly is very handy.

Also handy is the availability of tools within the product that make it easier to locate and fix problems. Of particular importance is the Drawing Explorer, which provides a consistent and efficient interface that provides access to over 20 different types of aspects of a drawing (e.g. layers, linetypes, text styles, etc.):

One example arose showing how useful this is, when my users were having an intermittent problem with some drawings locking up AutoCAD 2015 on open. Some trial and error made it possible to discover that the trigger for this was the existence of a text style (any text style) with a bigfont attached, where the bigfont SHX file did not exist. It was possible to fix this in an earlier or later AutoCAD release, which the users may or may not have available to them, by opening the drawing, using the STYLE command, then using that dialog box to go through each text style one at a time, looking for bigfonts.

It was much easier to quickly fire up BricsCAD, use the STYLE command which opens the Drawing Explorer in the Text Style section, and see all of the text styles laid out at once (see above). It was very efficient to quickly look for recalcitrant bigfonts and make them go away, or to see instantly that bigfonts weren’t the problem.

Similarly, the consistent, searchable and efficient interface of the BricsCAD Settings dialog makes it easy to check the values of any settings that you suspect may be triggering the problem in AutoCAD:

As a CAD Manager, it’s definitely worth your while to do the quick download and install of an evaluation BricsCAD. My experience in dealing with Bricsys is that requests for extensions for evaluation purposes are usually accepted, so you probably won’t have to give up your valuable tool as soon as your 30 days are up.

Once you’ve determined that it really is an invaluable tool to have around, the cost of entry is low enough to make it relatively easy to justify the investment. You won’t need to recover many drawings to get your money back.

More details of Bricsys 2018 in London

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As I mentioned in March, this year’s Bricsys conference will be held in London (yes, the British one) on 23 and 24 October.

More details have now been revealed on the Bricsys Conference page and tickets are now on sale. We now know:

- Venue: The Brewery, 52 Chiswell Street, London EC1Y 4SD, UK.
- Cost: €150, which is about US$180 (plus taxes in the EU, which you may be able to deduct). This is the early bird rate until 30 June.
- Speakers: Ten have been named so far, including big-name signing Heidi Hewett.

My attendance at the 2016 and 2017 conferences was well worthwhile, even coming from Australia. With the user/customer event now extending to two days rather than one, I expect this year’s event will be a step up from that. I’m hoping to attend this one too, in which case I will be happy to meet up with any of you.

bricsys,gent,london

Disclosure: Bricsys covered my travel expenses for the 2016 and 2017 conferences.

Steve’s BLADE presentation at the BricsCAD New Zealand and Australia Roadshow

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Sofoco (Australia) and CAD Concepts (New Zealand) recently ran a series of seminars throughout Australasia demonstrating BricsCAD. I attended the last of these in Brisbane on April 19 and gave a presentation about BricsCAD’s LISP, with reference to AutoCAD compatibility and the tools available to CAD Managers and developers, including BLADE. The talk was aimed at anybody who is writing or maintaining LISP code for AutoCAD or BricsCAD.

I had the just-before-lunch slot, which is never desirable for a presenter. People are dozing off and/or bursting to go to the toilet, and time adjustments have to be made if earlier presentations run over. I started 10 minutes late and therefore had to remove the demonstration part of the presentation on the fly, but I had planned to allow for that eventuality. It’s been a while since I have presented like this before an audience so I was a bit rusty and it wasn’t as free-flowing as I would have liked. Too many ‘erms’!

Steve’s invisible accordion is impressively large

I did manage to keep the whole audience in their seats until the end, though, so that’s something. Maybe the fact that I was waving a sword around had something to do with it.

Here’s my video, which is 21 minutes long. The sound is a bit muffled and my accent is Australian, so you might want to turn on subtitles using the CC option in the YouTube player.

Disclosure: the organisers covered part of my expenses.

Autodesk remotely killswitches AutoCAD licenses – again

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Following the AutoCAD 2019 rollout disaster, where subscription users found their AutoCAD 2018s were broken by an Autodesk licensing system meltdown, Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost issued an apology. He also assured customers on Twitter that it wouldn’t happen again:

While I welcomed that, I did have this to say at the time:

I don’t think such a guarantee is realistic, given that the nature of subscription software is to only work when it knows you’ve paid up. At least it demonstrates that the desire is there right at the top to try to prevent such debacles from occurring in future.

Autodesk watchers know that words mean little and actions are everything. I look forward to Andrew sharing news of the actions he’ll be taking to make good on his promise.

Back to the present. Does it come as a surprise to anybody to discover that less than a month later, Autodesk has again accidentally remotely killswitched people’s licenses? Again, not just the new release, but 2018 too. As reported on Twitter and www.asti.com:

After a couple of exchanges, the always-responsive people on the @AutodeskHelp Twitter feed came back with this:

So it’s fixed, but CAD Managers now have a bunch of work to do at their end to deal with a problem created at the Autodesk end. Somebody screwed up, they fixed it, another apology is issued, stuff happens, life goes on. That’s it for this month, probably. But it doesn’t address a very fundamental problem.

Let’s go back to basics.

The primary function of a licensing system is to allow use of the product by legitimate users.

Everything else is secondary. If a system relies on phoning home and getting the required response from a remote system before you’re permitted to use the software you paid for, not just after installation but on an ongoing basis, then it’s fundamentally flawed from the user’s point of view. Yet that is the system that Autodesk has chosen to base its business on.

No amount of sincere, deeply felt apologies or it’ll-never-happen-again promises will alter the fact that Autodesk has put its own convenience ahead of the ability of paying customers to use what they have paid for. Will Autodesk change that state of affairs? I very much doubt it, in which case it’s inevitable that this kind of thing will happen again, whatever anyone might promise.

The game has changed – Robert Green migrates to BricsCAD

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Is anybody left who still thinks BricsCAD isn’t a serious replacement for AutoCAD? If that’s you, perhaps the latest news might make you take it seriously. No, not the Heidi Hewett news. Even more recent news than that!

Robert Green, CAD Management guru, Cadalyst writer and consultant (not to mention a rather good guitarist) has been announced as the first Bricsys Certified Migration Consultant.

Image courtesy of Bricsys

Read all about what Robert has to say on this Bricsys blog post.

Anybody who has been reading this blog for the last few years will be surprised by none of what Robert has to say in that blog post. It’s not merely a repeat of what I’ve been saying for some time now, it’s all factually correct and easily verifiable by any competent CAD Manager.

I’ve been there and done that. I’ve gone through the process of taking a very complex custom AutoCAD environment, applying it to BricsCAD and giving it to my users. They loved it. No training was required to work as usual. Most things happened quicker, more conveniently, or both, starting right from the speedy installation. Once the product is in place and established, training can then be applied to take advantage of the places where BricsCAD is ahead of AutoCAD.

If you’re a CAD Manager where AutoCAD is used and you haven’t checked out BricsCAD yet, it’s about time you did.

This might come as a shock to those who see Autodesk domination of DWG CAD as a permanent fact of life, but the game has changed. AutoCAD’s stagnation and comments by senior figures show that the former flagship is clearly unloved by the powers within Autodesk. AutoCAD LT, even more so. An unimpressive AutoCAD 2019 shows that major improvements can no longer be expected in exchange for your ever-increasing annual payments, and with large numbers of people having been offloaded from the research and development teams, who would do it anyway? Meanwhile, BricsCAD development shoots ahead.

Thanks to decades of hostility towards customers that has only accelerated in recent years, Autodesk can’t even rely on customer loyalty for survival. When there’s a serious competitor that offers an easy migration path, the inertia that has kept Autodesk alive so far in the DWG space is no longer enough. The feeling among industry observers I meet is that Autodesk is in a decline of its own making. The only debate is whether that decline is temporary or terminal.

Back to Robert et al. Autodesk has lost many good people, and Bricsys is gaining them. The momentum is clearly with the Belgian company. Anybody want to run bets on who the next big name defector will be?

Steve at the BricsCAD New Zealand and Australia Roadshow

Autodesk removes ability to control products and updates by device

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If you’re a CAD Manager controlling Autodesk software through Autodesk Account, make sure you don’t ignore this little notice near the top:

Full details can be found on the page Device Management Discontinued in Autodesk Account, but in short another level of control and flexibility will be removed from you in a month or so.

I hope you’re sincerely grateful for Autodesk improving and simplifying the user management experience.

This only applies if you allow Autodesk desktop app to be installed, which I’ve always advised against. Of course, if you’re in a secure proxy environment there’s a good chance that Autodesk desktop app doesn’t work anyway, so the point is moot.

The great Autodesk Collections rip-off has ended

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I reported in January that, “The way Autodesk Collection licensing works, you can’t use more than two of the products in a Collection at once.”

Thanks to a policy reversal from Autodesk, this is no longer true. Felice on the Autodesk forums shared the good news:

Hi all, I have an update to share on this topic… we are removing the Industry Collection concurrent usage policy limitation. Here are some more details/background:

Overview:
Currently, the Industry Collection concurrent usage policy limits the number of collection products that can be used at the same time to two. The terms and conditions related to Industry Collection concurrent title access stated:

2.1.1 Notwithstanding anything to the contrary contained in the applicable Autodesk License and Services Agreement relating to any Industry Collection software program Benefit, the maximum number of Concurrent Access Titles that You or Your Named User may Access concurrently shall not exceed two (2) Concurrent Access Titles, at any one time.

Effective immediately we are removing this restriction and allowing customers to use as many products concurrently within the collection as they need to support their workflows.

Why we have removed this restriction:
The Industry Collections continue to evolve and are increasingly focused on the support of multi-product workflows. The restrictive nature of the concurrent usage policy does not support this progression.

The Autodesk Knowledge Network page on this has been updated accordingly:

This also applies for license borrowing, but only for 2019 products and later.

While this restriction should never have existed in the first place, it’s good to see it gone now.

Moving when prodded is alive at Autodesk.

Still can’t download AutoCAD 2019? Read this

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Timeline of AutoCAD 2019 events to date

- 20 March 2018 – Somebody (a reseller?) posts a video on YouTube with a collection of Autodesk video materials describing AutoCAD 2019; this is quickly removed
- 22 March 2018 – AutoCAD 2019 Released
- 22 March 2018 – Reports surface of AutoCAD 2019 activation acting as a killswitch for AutoCAD 2018
- 23 March 2018 – Attempts by myself and others to download AutocAD 2019 are thwarted by the non-availability of links and other issues
- 24 March 2018 – AVA, Autodesk Account and Autodesk desktop app all know nothing about AutoCAD 2019
- 24 March 2018 – I report on the various problems including the killswitch issue and lack of download availability
- 25 March 2018 – subscription customers report up to 2.5 days of AutoCAD 2018 downtime
- 27 March 2018 – Andrew Anagnost’s apology assures customers the issue is resolved (which of the issues he means is not specified but the context might imply it’s the killswitch one)
- 29 March 2018 – The Autodesk forums still contain the warning that disruptions to managing users, assigning permissions and downloading software are ongoing
- 3 April 2018 – Autodesk Account still fails to report availability of AutoCAD 2019 for multiple customers under active maintenance, subscription and enterprise agreement contracts

What to do if you want to get hold of AutoCAD 2019? Well, you can download the free trial version here. I wouldn’t recommend it, though, because that forces you to install and use the nasty Autodesk/Akamai download manager. Kill it with fire. This unpleasant fact now applies to all of Autodesk’s trial downloads, cutting off that formerly useful workaround for Autodesk’s download issues.

To get a straightforward malware-free browser download, you’re going to have to say hello to AVA (Autodesk Virtual Assistant). Yes, AVA is utterly useless at answering support questions and until very recently had no clue about the existence of AutoCAD 2019, but the latter issue is now resolved and you can use AVA as your workaround.

Steps to downloading with AVA

Click this link to get to AVA.
Log on with your Autodesk sign-in if you’re not already signed in.
Type AutoCAD 2019 download [Enter].
Pick Yes.
On the right, pick Next.
Select your operating system and language, then pick Next.
Pick the link under Browser Download.

The download should then start. The AutoCAD 2019 Windows 64 download is 1.7 GB but this will expand to more than another 5 GB before the installation proper takes place, after which the installed software will take up about another 2 GB. If you’re using a low-capacity SSD as your primary drive you might want to check you have enough space before you start.

AutoCAD 2019 rollout disaster

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If you’re an AutoCAD user, you may have been intrigued by the news about the new way Autodesk is bundling up AutoCAD 2019 with various verticals (perpetual license owners need not apply). This is Autodesk’s latest attempt to promote its subscription model and raise prices again. 7% this time, but much more to come. But never mind that, the main point is that you’re getting a whole lot of stuff, and who could say that’s not a good thing?

So it’s most unfortunate for Autodesk that the AutoCAD 2019 rollout has been an unmitigated disaster.

My own experiences in trying to download the product were sub-optimal, but I later learned that I was one of the lucky ones. Subscription users not only had problems with AutoCAD 2019, they found their AutoCAD 2018s were broken too, victims of an Autodesk licensing system meltdown. That’s right, the AutoCAD 2019 launch acted as a remote kill-switch for people’s production software.

Perpetual license users were fine, of course. Only subscription customers suffered. There’s a lesson there that should not go unnoticed.

Back to my own experiences, to begin with I couldn’t download AutoCAD 2019 anywhere, despite it being having been announced everywhere some hours earlier. Autodesk Account wasn’t showing 2019, but it was showing this:

The usual workaround method of downloading the free trial wasn’t any better; that was still on 2018. I even tried installing the execrable Autodesk desktop app (temporarily!), but there was no sign of AutoCAD 2019 there either.

I’ve never had any success using Autodesk’s AVA bot for any real questions, but there was a time when it served as a gateway to Akamai-free downloads, so I tried that. Unfortunately, AVA has been “improved” and that once-excellent feature is gone. I did try asking AVA for the download link to AutoCAD 2019, but that didn’t go well.

First attempt:

Second attempt:

I mentioned my difficulties on Twitter and a few hours later the long-suffering but always-professional @AutodeskHelp people offered this:

Despite appearances, this actually turned out to be helpful because by then the product trial download had been fixed and was offering 2019 rather than 2018. I still didn’t see a direct link and against my better judgement tolerated a very temporary installation of Autodesk’s nasty Akamai download manager. About 5 minutes into the download it said it was going to take about 9 hours so I went away and left it. I returned within the hour to find it was finished, so I have no idea how long it actually took. After immediately uninstalling all traces of Akamai and Autodesk desktop app, I was able to start my evaluation.

So how’s the product? Pretty much the same as 2018, except with a better drawing compare tool. Oh, and the icons are better. The first command I ran in the new release reminded me that some things never change. The ancient rectangular pickbox bug popped in to see me, just like an old friend.

I’ve been warmed by the familiar, comforting experience of this and various other early 90s-era bugs and limitations, where the easiest workaround is to use a competitor’s product to do those bits. More on that in a future post.

An hour or so into using the product saw it crash and burn for the first time:

Don’t take my word for it, though; here are some comments from various users, CAD Managers and long-term Autodesk fans, most of whom had a worse time of it than I did. It’s not just AutoCAD; LT and Navisworks are definitely affected and there may be others. Comments here have been reproduced from various sources under fair use; names have been removed to protect the innocent.

I think it is safe to say that Autodesk are having a very bad day. Account and activation issues, subscription access issues, forum login issues, kudos and comments blocked to some users…

I installed the brand new @Navisworks Manage 2019 last night, and this morning I get the “Your trial has expired” !!!

I can safely say that ‘unimpressed’ is my status right now with the licencing idiocy going on. Not only can I not get the 2019 version, but my 2018 version has stopped working too.

Looks like all subscription (not maintenance or legacy) software is affected this way: logging in and out as well as workarounds posted are not working. Now this is a good reason to abandon Autodesk subscription model.

Good news: Autodesk began rollout of 2019 licenses! Bad news: It might break your 2018 licenses.

Hard to imagine this rollout going any worse.
[Autodesk]”Hold my beer….”

2.5 days without AutoCAD available. I just wish Autodesk would have told us so I could have gone on vacation. Instead, I will have to work thru the weekend to make up lost time.

I love Autodesk and their software, but they have just ditched an entire generation of Autodesk ‘rockstars’ and their subscription portal isn’t working. It really doesn’t look good, does it?

my 2018 is hosed on 3 devices

Unfortunately the situation has lasted for nearly 24 hours and no work done. Can we send the bill to Autodesk?

so I thought I’d try and activate LT
LOL

Although some parts of this are supposedly fixed, it’s not over yet. As I type this, people are still reporting problems and Autodesk is still offering apologies:

Even now, AVA is still completely in the dark about the current release of Autodesk’s traditional flagship product.

It’s great to see users helping each other, though. You may find this Autodesk Forum post by Travis Nave useful as an interim workaround. Also, in a marvellous continuation of McNeel’s free service to the AutoCAD (and BricsCAD) LISP community, DOSLib has been made available for AutoCAD 2019 even before many people were even able to get hold of the software it runs on. That’s what I call service!

All in all, this has not the best start to AutoCAD’s brave new world of oneness. How did it go for you?

Bricsys 2018 comes to London

Rock on, Robert Green!

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I’d like to offer my congratulations to Robert Green on his landmark of 400 issues of the CAD Manager’s Newsletter. There’s a interview with Robert here.

As a fellow CAD Manager and Cadalyst contributor, I’ve admired Robert’s work for many years. I finally got to meet Robert last year at the Bricsys Conference 2017 in Paris, and it was a pleasure.

Legends on stage – Robert being interviewed by Don Strimbu at Bricsys 2017

Robert, R.K. McSwain and Steve enjoy lunch at the Carrousel du Louvre

No pictures! R.K. McSwain, Nancy Johnson and Robert

Robert rocks out

Some of you will already be aware that Robert is a seriously good guitarist, and he did not disappoint at the after-conference party. I look forward to seeing Robert again, and to reading many more of his insightful articles.

CAD Panacea tip – startup files in BricsCAD

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One of the things that might initially baffle a CAD Manager or power user when investigating switching from AutoCAD to BricsCAD is how to set up the startup routines. Head over to CAD Panacea for R.K. McSwain’s concise, handy description of how to do it.

Due to BricsCAD’s high level of compatibility, you can maintain a common folder or set of folders containing LISP and other custom files for both applications. That way, you don’t need to do double maintenance during the transition period. I’ve done this successfully in a highly complex custom environment. Some code and other adjustments were required in places, but all but a handful of my hundreds of AutoCAD LISP files worked as-is in BricsCAD with zero effort.

Having added your AutoCAD custom folder(s) to BricsCAD’s search path, I suggest you make a common startup LISP file (e.g. rename your old acaddoc.lsp to something like CADStartupDoc.lsp) and have tiny stub startup LISP files for each application (acaddoc.lsp and on_doc_load.lsp) that each loads the common startup file.

acaddoc.lsp contents:
(load "CADStartupDoc")

on_doc_load.lsp contents:
(load "CADStartupDoc")

You can add error checking and messaging if you like, but if you have control of your environment you probably won’t even need that. If you find you do need any application-specific code, you can just add it or load it from the acaddoc.lsp or on_doc_load.lsp stubs as appropriate.

Autodesk contemplates Bentley-style licensing

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Some of you may have received an invitation from Autodesk to provide survey feedback. This hints at a possible move towards time based licensing (e.g. hourly), and asks what kind of tools you will need to handle that. Sometimes these questions lead to nothing, other times they are a precursor to inevitable change (desirable or not). If it’s the latter, I can only surmise that Autodesk is concerned that its customers haven’t been thoroughly peed off by anything new in a while and is investigating novel and interesting ways to annoy them.

Ask a Bentley customer what annoys them most about dealing with the company and odds are you’ll be told that it’s the time-based licensing system introduced to SELECT customers a few years ago. Tales abound of rip-off calculations, huge unexpected end-of-period bills, companies being billed for impossible numbers of hours, and so on. Some customers even went as far as calling the system a scam or a fraud.

Some of the worst excesses of SELECT are apparently now fixed, but this system is still unpopular with many customers. So I guess it’s only natural for Autodesk to examine moving in that direction.

Are your drawings SHOUTING?

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This post was inspired by a question raised by Jamie Myers in the CAD Managers Unite! Facebook group.

Long ago, before CAD was in common use, I was taught technical drawing at school. One of the things I was taught was to follow drafting standards, BS308 at the time. Later, I was expected to follow AS1100. One of the things I was taught was to always use capital letters in text on drawings, using the approved ISO font. Without a machine, without a template. This stuck to me to such an extent that even today I use all caps when handwriting notes. Note to wife? Caps. Shopping list? Caps. I can’t help it, it’s hardwired.

Let’s do that paragraph again, this time using the case as it would be seen on most drawings in my experience, and as I would automatically tend to enter it on a drawing:

LONG AGO, BEFORE CAD WAS IN COMMON USE, I WAS TAUGHT TECHNICAL DRAWING AT SCHOOL. ONE OF THE THINGS I WAS TAUGHT WAS TO FOLLOW DRAFTING STANDARDS – BS308 AT THE TIME. LATER, I WAS EXPECTED TO FOLLOW AS1100. ONE OF THE THINGS I WAS TAUGHT WAS TO ALWAYS USE CAPITAL LETTERS IN TEXT ON DRAWINGS, USING THE APPROVED ISO FONT. WITHOUT A MACHINE, WITHOUT A TEMPLATE. THIS STUCK TO ME TO SUCH AN EXTENT THAT EVEN TODAY I USE ALL CAPS WHEN HANDWRITING NOTES. NOTE TO WIFE? CAPS. SHOPPING LIST? CAPS. I CAN’T HELP IT, IT’S HARDWIRED.

Show those paragraphs to 100 people in the street and ask them which is the most legible, and I’m pretty sure the mixed-case one will be chosen by the vast majority. It also uses up less space, which can be an issue on a crowded drawing.

You wouldn’t use all caps on the Internet unless you were SHOUTING because otherwise you would be mistaken for one of those unhinged conspiracy theorists. Just as I’m hardwired to write in upper case, I’m also hardwired to skip blocks of upper case text on the Internet (e.g. Terms of Use) without even attempting to read it.

Why, then, do so many of us still use ALL CAPS in drawings? Inertia? Standards?

There are some legitimate arguments that can be made to support the continued use of upper case on drawings. I was taught that capitals were used to ensure that when a drawing was reproduced, taken out on site and subjected to folds, dirty fingers and oil stains, the chances of something being rendered illegible was smaller in the case of a capital letter. It has been pointed out that ‘up’ and ‘dn’ are identical when inverted. Quick, is ‘l’ an upper case I or a lower case L?

I understand all caps usage varies substantially from country to country and the language used will also make a difference.

Let’s have your viewpoint on this subject. Please comment and/or pick a poll option. It’s a deliberately binary poll so you can’t fudge and have to pick one, and it’s about which one you think is better (most suited for purpose), not which one you use.

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This and usually a few other polls live at the top of the left sidebar (on a PC browser). Here is the polls archive.

How to sign your LISP files

How to obtain a digital signature to sign your LISP files

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In an earlier post, I explained why you might want to digitally sign your LISP files. If you decide to go ahead with that, then this post explains how you can obtain and install the digital signature you will need to sign your files. This is the most difficult part of the process and it involves spending money.

Getting a digital signature

Although you can make your own digital signature (there’s an Autodesk Knowledgebase article describing the process), there’s little point in doing this. You can sign your files, sure, but that signature won’t be seen as trusted by software that checks for it. Anybody can create a signature like that, including one that impersonates you, and it doesn’t prove anything. The only purpose for such a home-made signature would be to test the methods you’ll be using to apply a proper trusted signature later.

Edit: if you do want to make your own signature, BlackBox informs me that the MakeCert tool in the Windows SDK mentioned in the Knowledgebase article is deprecated. He suggests using this PowerShell Cmdlet instead.

You’re going to need a signature that is trusted. That means you’re going to have to pay somebody trustworthy to trust you. There are a set of certifying authorities, trusted by Microsoft, Autodesk, etc. who can issue code signing certificates to companies and people. You need to prove who you are to one of those authorities and pay them to certify that you are who you say you are. So before you start, make sure you or your business are visible in terms of directory listings, publicly visible phone numbers, etc. If you are representing a company asking for a certificate, you can expect to be asked to produce evidence that you really represent that company. You can expect to confirm that your email and phone number are really under your control.

You only need to do this once a year, or even once every several years if you pay in advance. You might find that the evidence you need to provide changes at renewal time; for example a Yellow Pages listing that was OK in 2015 was no longer accepted when I renewed in 2017, so I had to register my business with another listing.

In my search for a certifying authority, I found that K Software, a reseller for Comodo, was the cheapest source for a code signing certificate, see here. An OV certificate will be fine for signing LISP.

K Software takes your money (USD $67 to $84 a year depending on the length of time you need), gets Comodo to provide the certificate, and provides a handy tool (KSign) that allows you to simply apply the certificate to various files without some of the messing about that’s otherwise required. It’s not useful for LISP files, though. Comodo also provides the support, and I’m happy to report that in my experience their customer service is excellent.

Note: it’s important that you pay close attention to the instructions when applying for your certificate. For example, the browser you use to apply for the certificate is vital. Choose one that’s suggested (e.g. Firefox) and which you expect to use later to obtain the certificate.

Installing a digital signature

Once your evidence is accepted and your payment has gone through, you will be sent an email with a special code, allowing you to obtain the certificate. It’s important that you’re using the same browser on the same computer that you used when applying for the certificate.

Once you click the link and obtain the certificate, you’ll want to export it. In Firefox 58.0, use Options > Privacy & Security and scroll to the bottom to see View Certificates. Select the certificate and pick Export. This will create a .P12 file that you can back up and install on this or another computer. To install the certificate, double-click the .P12 file and follow the prompts to assign it to the current user in the default location (Personal).

That’s it. You should now have a certificate installed that you will be able to use to sign LISP and other files. To check this, start the Windows Certificate Manager (C:\Windows\System32\certmgr.msc). Have a look in Current User > Personal > Certificates and you should find your newly installed certificate.

The next post in this series will explain how to apply this digital signature to your LISP files. That’s the easy bit.

Why digitally sign your LISP files?

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After I mentioned in an earlier post that I had digitally signed the sample LISP file I had provided, this generated some interest. In this post, I’ll explain why you might want to sign your LISP files. In a later post, I’ll explain how to do it.

These days it is standard practice for developers to digitally sign their code. Operating systems and applications are displaying increasingly scary warnings when coming across unsigned code. Here is an example of the sort of message you get when you load an unsigned LISP file into AutoCAD from a location that has not been explicitly configured as a trusted location:

If you’re a CAD Manager dealing with your own internal code, it’s not too onerous to configure AutoCAD in Options > Files such that a folder is trusted by AutoCAD and place your code in there. The folder should be read-only; if it isn’t, AutoCAD warns you when you try to configure it. If you do this, the scary warnings don’t appear to bother and confuse your users, even if your code is unsigned.

Another way a CAD Manager can avoid the warnings is to set the SECURELOAD system variable to 0. That’s generally not recommended because it turns off AutoCAD’s security features. While you’ll probably get away with this, there’s always a chance that a user will load some malware and then you’ll have to explain yourself to management.

If you’re not just using your code internally and it’s going to be used by other parties, then you’re not going to have that level of control over the user environment. In recent AutoCADs it’s possible to set up the installation deployment such that users can’t turn off the security settings. If the CAD Manager at the location using your code has done this, your potential users are going to be presented with unprofessional-looking scary warnings.

If you sign your code, users might still get a warning, but it’s less scary. It identifies you as the verified source of the code so they will have more confidence in picking the Always Load button. Once they’ve done this, other signed code of yours will be automatically trusted.

There’s another important reason you might want to sign your code, and that’s protection against other people’s modification of your code. If somebody edits your LSP file and then gives it to someone who tries to load it, the user is presented with an even scarier warning:

Note that this warning no longer has your name on it. This means it’s possible to protect yourself from people (internal or external) who well-meaningly hack about with your code and then try to blame you when it goes wrong. It also gives a level of protection against your code being infected by malware.

Note that all of the above only applies to AutoCAD 2016 and later. AutoCAD 2014 introduced some LISP loading security measures, but the signature stuff came a couple of releases later. Earlier AutoCAD releases, along with compatibles such as BricsCAD and ZWCAD, will just ignore the digital signature. It’s just a comment in the code as far as they’re concerned.

LISP files with the LSP, MNL, FAS, or VLX file extensions can be digitally signed. There’s a bug in the original iterations of AutoCAD 2016 and AutoCAD 2018 that prevents signed VLX files from working. This was patched later in both releases (2016 SP1 and 2018.0.2), but if you’re distributing your code externally there’s always a chance that your VLX might end up in the hands of somebody using a broken release. Also, VLX files that are digitally signed cannot be loaded into AutoCAD 2015 and earlier, broken or not. You should bear that in mind before distributing signed VLX files. I don’t do it and would advise against it. Thanks, Autodesk.

Given this information, if you decide that signing your LISP is a good idea, watch this space for information on how to do it.

The great Autodesk Collections rip-off

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Autodesk not only wants to move its customers from perpetual licenses to subscription (rental), it wants to move them from individual products to Industry Collections. Why? Because the rental cost of Collections is higher and more money can be extracted from each customer.

There’s nothing conspiracy-theorist about the above statement, it has been explicitly laid out by now-CEO Andrew Anagnost at an Investor Day, and the cunning plan has been placed on the public record. Have a good read of that document, it’s very revealing. AutoCAD LT users are going to be “encouraged” into full AutoCAD, AutoCAD users are are going to be “encouraged” into AutoCAD-based verticals, and so on, into Collections. Onwards and upwards.

Collections, you may remember, are groups of applications sold together. They’re just like Suites used to be, only bigger and rental-only. They’re expensive, but they contain a lot of products. For example, the AEC Collection rents at $2,690 PA (single-user US price). It contains the following products (individual product US annual rental cost shown in [brackets]):

Advance Steel [not stated]
AutoCAD [$1,176]
AutoCAD Architecture [$1,575]
AutoCAD Civil 3D [$2,100]
AutoCAD Electrical [$1,575]
AutoCAD Map 3D [$1,575]
AutoCAD MEP [$1,575]
AutoCAD Plant 3D [$1,575]
AutoCAD Raster Design [$840]
AutoCAD mobile app [free]
Cloud storage (25 GB) [free]
Dynamo Studio [$300]
Fabrication CADmep [$900]
FormIt Pro [not stated – Collection only]
InfraWorks [$1,575]
Insight [not stated – cloud credits]
Navisworks Manage [$2,070]
ReCap Pro [$300]
Autodesk Rendering [not stated – cloud credits]
Revit [$2,200]
Revit Live [$250]
Robot Structural Analysis Professional [not stated – Collection only]
3ds Max [$1,470]
Structural Analysis for Revit [not stated – cloud credits]
Structural Bridge Design [not stated – Collection only]
Vehicle Tracking [not stated – Collection only]

Note that Autodesk doesn’t make it easy to work out the equivalent total cost, but you can see there’s an impressively large number of products listed. For those products where prices are listed, adding together the above comes to $21,056 PA. So $2,690 PA is a huge bargain, right?

Not really.

First, some of those costs are counted multiple times. For example, AutoCAD Civil 3D also includes AutoCAD Map 3D and AutoCAD, so that’s $2,100 worth, not $4,851. AutoCAD gets counted about five times if you just add up the numbers.

Next, it’s highly unlikely that anybody uses all of the products in a Suite or Collection. How many do get used? On average, two, according to Autodesk. That corresponds with my own experience. But let’s say you do have a need to use more than two? That leads us to…

The way Autodesk Collection licensing works, you can’t use more than two of the products in a Collection at once.

You won’t find that prominently displayed among all the marketing blurb that promotes the value for money of Collections. Instead, you’ll find words like these:

Download and install what you want, whenever you like—whether it’s for occasional use, to meet requirements of a particular project or client, or to explore new workflows.

That’s not actually false; you can indeed download and install all of those products (only one at a time, but that’s a different complaint). You’re just not allowed to use them. Not at once.

Where does it say that? Well, If you know what links to click, you can eventually find this KnowledeBase page that tells you about the restriction and which products it applies to. Which is pretty much all of them:

Individual users of an industry collection may access no more than two (2) of the following desktop titles at any one time.

Architecture, Engineering & Construction Collection
Autodesk® Advance Steel
Autodesk® AutoCAD®
Autodesk® AutoCAD® Architecture
Autodesk® AutoCAD® Civil 3d
Autodesk® AutoCAD® Electrical
Autodesk® AutoCAD® Map 3d
Autodesk® AutoCAD® MEP
Autodesk® AutoCAD® P&ID
Autodesk® AutoCAD® Plant 3d
Autodesk® AutoCAD® Utility Design
Autodesk® Dynamo Studio
Autodesk® Fabrication CADmep
Autodesk® Navisworks Manage
Autodesk® Revit:
Autodesk® Revit Architecture
Autodesk® Revit MEP
Autodesk® Revit Structure
Autodesk® Revit Live
Autodesk® Robot Structural Analysis Professional
Autodesk® Structural Bridge Design
Autodesk® 3ds Max

This is a ludicrous restriction. Imagine not being allowed to have three Office applications open at once. Clippy: “It looks like you’re trying to open a spreadsheet! Sorry, you’re already reading an email and you have a Word document open. Go away.”

Why is Autodesk doing this? To make sure you don’t get good value out of your subscription dollars. Remember, good value for you is less revenue for them. Want to do more stuff? Buy more licenses.

This restriction does not apply to Suites. There is no technical reason it has to apply to Collections, either. It’s just a stealthy cash grab.

This is how it goes with Autodesk subscription. You’ll get sucked in by promising-sounding marketing, then once you’re trapped you’ll get screwed over.

cad nauseam

Mostly AutoCAD, BricsCAD and related subjects

Category Archives: CAD Management

Why every AutoCAD CAD Manager should have a copy of BricsCAD – part 2, 3D operations

Why every AutoCAD CAD Manager should have a copy of BricsCAD – part 1, fixing drawings

More details of Bricsys 2018 in London

Steve’s BLADE presentation at the BricsCAD New Zealand and Australia Roadshow

Autodesk remotely killswitches AutoCAD licenses – again

The game has changed – Robert Green migrates to BricsCAD

Steve at the BricsCAD New Zealand and Australia Roadshow

Autodesk removes ability to control products and updates by device

The great Autodesk Collections rip-off has ended

Still can’t download AutoCAD 2019? Read this

Timeline of AutoCAD 2019 events to date

Steps to downloading with AVA

AutoCAD 2019 rollout disaster

Bricsys 2018 comes to London

Rock on, Robert Green!

CAD Panacea tip – startup files in BricsCAD

Autodesk contemplates Bentley-style licensing

Are your drawings SHOUTING?

How to sign your LISP files

How to obtain a digital signature to sign your LISP files

Why digitally sign your LISP files?

The great Autodesk Collections rip-off