2D walls without offsetting? Help.

[mrplans]

I have hundreds of unique floor plans to get through this year and I'm looking to speed up the process however I can (if you have suggestions, please share). 

Walls

My current approach in drawing a 2D floor plan is to outline the exterior walls with a Pline and then offset the thickness that I require for that wall (ie, 6"). Next, I would cut out sections from windows and door, and once that's done, I would fill the wall in with a solid hatch. .. but this takes forever as you all know.

In effort to speed things up, I'm now using one line, centered with the lineweight thickness set to mimic the thickness of the wall. This works fine for general drawings that don't require exact dimensions. The main problem I'm having with this approach is:

• corners are showing rounded. I need them squared. See attached. How?
• doors/windows have the line overlapping onto the frame (note the rounded end of the line overlapping onto the door frame). How to prevent this and have the line shown as a squared edge?

Thanks. Any other suggestions or tips would be great to accelerate the process.

[Kazo]

what about a pline....and setting the width to required thickness ?? this way you can get 'flat' edges and square corners.

[pendean]

AutoCAD Architecture is not an option on a MAC (yet?): with plain AutoCAD, even on a MAC, you will need to use old lisps like the classic DLINE (or MLINE) and lots of customizations (I've not seen architectural add-ons for ACAD-MAC yet), just like they do in plain AutoCAD in Windows.

If you explore the Dynamic Blocks forum area, there are many posted Door and Window blocks to use, some employ masking to simulate wall breaks and sit over "walls". Or you can create your own such blocks as well.