r/AutoCAD

So im working on a rather large project and we're basically in the stage that we are done with the drawings, entire elevation plans, i engineered the entire project from A to Z, and now the project developer came over to us and asked us if we could raise the construction level of the houses by 0.15cm..

and so now im looking at my drawing, nearly 400 blocks with each a separate value for elevation, which some need to be raised and some lowered in sections and some stay the same, so i'm looking for a way on how i could select the blocks that need to be changed, and raise or lower all the values by .15 without messing with the inherit values. cause if i do this manually it will take hours more or less. are there any plug-ins that could help me with this or have i been oblivious to certain possibilities within autoCAD

For extra information:

I work on ACAD 2027.

Nothing is bound to a Z coordinate.

(did see a plug-in on autodesk that was free, i believe it was called Increments)

in the process of changing the scale of one of my drawings and my intern isnt in today, haha. is there a command or lisp routine to convert mtxt to a multileader? when i search for this function, the search results are full of people talking about converting separate mtxt/txt and qleaders. i dont have a leader. im starting with mtxt. it would be cool to have a lisp or command that went straight from mtxt to a multileader.

Heya friends, I'm making the migration from sketchup to autocad because if the continued push towards making the free version unusable. I get free access to Autocad via university so I figured I'd give it a go.

If anyone could point me towards specific tutorials for the following operations I'd be super grateful.

I need to:

Make a cuboid

Trace a letter or other character on the top surface

Extrude that character up

Slope/angle the extrusion so the sides form like a pyramid if that makes sense? It's so the physical opject doesn't get stuck if pressed into something.

If you're familiar with moveable metal type for letterpress, that's exactly what I'm trying to recreate.

Thanks for your help!

Does anyone have tips for making dimensions as easy and seamless as Revit.

Honestly, dimensions in acad are such a chore. For context I mastered Revit first before AutoCAD so I was already introduced to an easy and straightforward system in Revit before moving to AutoCAD.

My main issue is how every new drawing always has a dimension that's always too small for the drawing size both in the model and layout space. I actually love how customisable and versatile the dimension properties are and it can be very helpful but I would really appreciate a tutorial or explanation for how to create a simple "work every time" type of dimension. If I need to customise, I know how to do that but I just need it to work first.

Is it possible to print to a pdf and keep markup transparency? So far I'm not seeing any options for that, and when I print to pdf the markups are a solid color.

Any help or advice would be appreciated, thank you.

EDIT: UPDATE, I may have found the solution. In Autodesk Design Review I was clicking the printer button (or CRTL+P) to print, my printer selected to Adobe PDF and that was causing the solid markups vs transparent markups after saving the new pdf. Changed my printer to Microsoft Print to PDF, and I was able to preserve transparent markups in the newly saved PDF file. Silly issue, simple solution. I was using the transparent markups for quick area calcs, and wanted to save those areas in a PDF file.

After trying and failing a few times to find a method to create a custom SHX font in AutoCAD, coming to Reddit seemed like the next logical step. Documentation on the subject is vastly outdated in most places so hopefully someone can shed light on this forgotten practice.

What most sources instruct:

1. Draw your characters with polylines

2. Save your characters with the MKSHAPE command

3. Add characters to the generated SHP file

4. Run the COMPILE command to export the final SHX file

There is a major problem with step #2- MKSHAPE does NOT save geometry in the correct format for compiling; let me explain. Using the dumpshx.exe, I was able to unconvert an existing SHX font into an SHP file. I quickly began editing/recompiling the data and realized, these are not just coordinates. There is a whole system of text formatting commands embedded in every line. This is why the MKSHAPE method stops making sense. There are no prompts for text box dimensions, the starting points of consecutive characters, or any other text formatting instructions.

My conclusion is the MKSHAPE command was updated to only be used for exporting geometry and no longer functions as a character definition tool. While the dumpshx.exe successfully unconverts SHX files for character redefinition & recompilation, I have yet to find a way to export CAD geometry in the format needed for SHX compilation.

I'm a freelancer, and just this week I've had two new clients—one I'm currently working with and another that's a prospective contract—ask me to work directly from their shared drives (one uses Google Drive, the other Dropbox).

Is this becoming standard practice for AutoCAD projects?

I understand the benefits from a file-sharing and collaboration standpoint, especially with small teams of two or three people. But after many years of providing remote CAD services in the interior design industry, I've never been asked to work this way before. The fact that it happened twice in the same week has me wondering if this is a new trend or if I've just managed to avoid it until now.

Curious to hear how other freelancers and CAD professionals are handling this. Is working directly from a client's cloud drive now the norm?

What is the best way of converting DWG/DXF to PDF via APS?

I looked into APS and its available APIs and created a POC that uses the Automation API v3 to run a custom plot script that does a somewhat decent job.

However, I'm wondering if this is the best way to go about it. On the Automation API docs they even mention it as a core use case:

>Imagine you have thousands of DWG files stored in the cloud, and you need them all converted to PDF files.

But I could only find this convert DWG to PDF tutorial for v2 that uses "_PLOT" command to do the conversion.

I couldn't seem to find a way of using the "_EXPORTPDF" that seems to be used by AutoCAD itself when doing the export to PDF directly on the program, which I imagine could be better.

I'm also wondering if using the Automation API with Revit instead of AutoCAD could provider better results.

Does anyone have any recommendation of how to go about this? My main use case is that I want to programmatically convert a big number of DWG to PDF files in my web app which is why using the APS Automation API HTTP endpoints seemed like a good idea.