Newsgroups and discussion services:
As the owner
of Cadvision Drafting & Scanning®, I
have been a long time user of Bulletin boards, CompuServe, and Internet
Newsgroups These have been the source of some of the best productivity tools
we have included into our menus since the early DOS versions of AutoCAD.
You
can set up News accounts in many mail software, like Outlook Express. You set up a
new account, select News, press ADD and follow the prompts. When asked to the
server enter "discussion.autodesk.com", for the Autodesk run
groups. You can have more than one News account. We have Jetstream so
our news server is "news.xtra.co.nz". You can also
access Newsgroups from www.google.co.nz,
and select the Groups tab.
The
Autodesk groups are monitored by Autodesk staff and some restrictions apply.
Where the general groups like "alt.cad.autocad",
"alt.cad", "comp.cad.autocad", "nz.comp" will
have many treads of conflicting opinion.
There
are also list services that email the postings to you, so you don't have to
log on to see if there is a reply. Everyone should join AUGI (AutoCAD Users
Group International), http://www.augi.com/welcome.asp
. It’s free and list service is available here, you also get a free
magazine.
Talk
with you co-workers; friends that work for other companies, your dealers, and
ask them what they do in a situation you are having problems with. They may
have fixed it months ago, or even years ago. (
I recently needed help with partial menu and a drafty in Norway had a
solution on alt.cad.autocad. I was able to get the sales manager from Consistent Software to buy him a beer for his
help.)
Some worthwhile AutoCAD related links:
www.download.com, www.shareware.com, www.downloadalot.com, www.cadwerx.net/,www.dotsoft.com,
www.acad.co.uk/freesoft/progs.htm,
www.intelcad.com/pages/down/,
www.caddepot.com, www.cadonline.com/, www.cadfx.com/downloads/index.phtml,
www.cadtoolsonline.com/free.htm,
www.cadmasters.com/cadlinks.html, http://www.llpsite.com/index.htm
PDF
Creation links
http://www.pdf995.com/, http://www.win2pdf.com/
This
is just a couple I've used lately. Please send other links worth mentioning
to kevin@rastertech.co.nz. Remember
your Dealers website is always a good start.
Bluebeam Pushbutton PDF(TM)- AutoCAD
Plug-in for PDF Drawing (
good, but not the cheapest)
Pushbutton PDF seamlessly plugs into AutoCAD
to produce full-scale, high quality, printer or plotter-read PDF drawings
without complicated conversion processes. Plus, Pushbutton PDF creates
intelligent PDFs that include features such as embedding files in the PDF
drawing, transferring hyperlinks and block attributes from AutoCAD, adding
custom text stamps, and pre-setting digital signature fields.
Download a free fully functional evaluation
copy from: http://www.bluebeam.com/download2.asp
Some of my old favourites:
CxDocBar
- graphically change between open drawings HOT
Quickpik
- lock toolbars, full width layer drop down & many more HOT
Tracking
- New Zealand On-road Tracking Curves HOT
A lot of my lisp over the years has related to
annotation, these are my most used
semfiles/addtext.lsp;
semfiles/boxtext1.zip; semfiles/ddchtx.zip; semfiles/ddedtx.zip semfiles/pt11.lsp;
semfiles/subs.zip (super/sub script bigfont);
Spreadsheet to AutoCAD... I have used TabPRO since
R11
semfiles/spandemo.zip; semfiles/tabpro34.zip; semfiles/xls2dxf.exe
Isotools, including dimensioning - semfiles/Iso2000 demo.exe
Edit blocks: Run Blkedit and anything you do will
apply to the block until you run bkldone - semfiles/blkedit.zip
Delete everything outside the picked window, I have
a variation that deletes outside the drawing limits (easy to modify this); semfiles/delwin.zip
Double offset: semfiles/doff.lsp
Move/Copy/Rotate: semfiles/mcr.lsp
Switch viewable LTscale between PS & MS (not
tried):semfiles/ltscale_switch.zip
Change your snapang to match a lines: semfiles/piksnap.lsp
Make
DLL of your toolbar button BMP's - Reshacker semfiles/reshack.zip
Power
Lisp demo semfiles/power.zip
