Civil Inconsistent standards
Revisions and transmittals without leaving AutoCAD
A plugin that reads every title block in a folder, then bulk-revises, plots and prepares the selected drawings for issue.
- Client context
- Civil engineering team
- Built with
- AutoCAD, .NET
What changed
The team can revise, plot and prepare a transmittal across the selected drawing set from inside AutoCAD. Files and layouts pass through the same issue process instead of being opened and updated one by one.
The problem
AutoCAD can plot drawings and store information in title blocks, but it does not give this team one place to manage a complete issue. The job was also complicated by how the drawings were stored: some projects kept one drawing per file, some used several layouts, and others mixed the two. Whatever the structure, each issue meant opening files one by one, editing revisions in the title blocks, plotting to PDF, renaming the outputs and assembling the transmittal. A side spreadsheet tracked the set, but it could fall out of step with the drawings.
What I built
I built a plugin that scans a folder and pulls each drawing’s number, title, status, revision and date from its title block into one view. The user selects the drawings for the issue, updates their revisions, plots the set to PDF and prepares the transmittal for a CDE such as ACC or Aconex.
The plugin is part of a larger toolset I built for the team, including tools that generate Xrefs and create drawings from a drawing list. Each part follows the way the team already runs a project.