Editing autocad drawings in inventor and vise versa.

[drowlee]

I'll start with a explanation of the situation here.

We use inventor for 90% of our work at my company. We do our drawings in it and we convert everything to inventor that we get in. We recently started some work for a client who wants everything in a very specific autocad format that they call their standard.

I have been messing around with importing their blank drawings that contain just the title block and border to inventor and then doing all the dimensioning and such before doing a save copy as autocad dwg and reopening in autocad. The problem so far is that the text all changes fonts, the dimensions are not like autocad dimensions, and text is too small. None of those are really that big of a problem individually as I can just do a match properties on each and be done with it after I do one correctly.

The biggest problem is that the others in here aren't a fan of working in autocad and are trying to have to do the least amount of work possible to convert these back and forth so as to allow them to work in inventor for as much as possible and then back to autocad without having font and dimension issues. I have clearly been tasked with the assignment of finding the most efficient way possible to do this as we have a whole lot of work coming in from this client and I won't have time to find more efficient ways once we get a bit busier.

So any help would be greatly appreciated by myself and those I work with.

[drowlee]

I'm not sure how to add it to my signature or whatever it is, but I have inventor 2013 and autocad mechanical 2013 if that matters.

[mdavis22569]

Do the 2d as an Inventor DWG vs' doing an Inventor IDW.. Set your layers and titles blocks as they require then.

[drowlee]

I have been doing the drawings as inventor DWGs and then opening them in autocad and just pasting them in to the border for the client. The problem I run in to with doing it that way is that if I dimension it first then go to autocad then the dimensions and font are different becuase I don't think inventor has them available. Is it possible to get all the layers and fonts from the autocad dwg to an inventor dwg so that when I take it back to autocad it is ready to go?

[mdavis22569]

Work on them as IDW's ..then save them down to DWG's as needed..is that possible? Maybe make a template /border etc for them in Inventor and save that down as well Mike

[drowlee]

That's pretty much we're going about it now. The problem with importing or creating the border and title block is that they both are very non-standard and don't seem to come out right when building them or importing them to inventor.

I'll see what I can do with this so far. I appreciate the ideas though.

[mdavis22569]

Have you tried copy and paste of the them into Inventor vs importing? I prefer importing, however if it doesn't work then I'll copy them of one and paste it into another and save it as the new title block

[Curtis_Waguespack]

Hi drowleem,

I think people who do this often, generally take the time to set up their Inventor styles to look very close to their desired AutoCAD output styles. So that might be something to look into. I believe the fastest way to do this would be to import an AutoCAD file and use that to set up a template and styles in Inventor.

To output the file, you'll want to go to the I button > Save As > Save Copy As > AutodCAD Drawings (*.dwg)

Then click the Options button.

In the 2nd screen of the DWG File Export Options dialog box, you can choose an AutoCAD Template File to use for the exporting. If you click the Mapping Options button you can configure the linetypes and some general settings.

If these options still don't get you close enough, I'm guessing that you would likely be able to tweak whatever is left with a LISP routine in AutoCAD, for a "one button" solution. You might consider posting some sample files or screen shots or further details about the font discrepancies, etc.

I hope this helps.
Best of luck to you in all of your Inventor pursuits,
Curtis
http://inventortrenches.blogspot.com

[drowlee]

So would I import or just open an autocad drawing? After that I get the idea but my first attempt led me to two blank layout pages with no sign of the autocad border or title blocks.

[drowlee]

also the styles thing is kind of difficult for us. We run everything out of the projects manager and our style is from a network location that we all use. We are also doing work for other companies who do not use their standard so changing the style would potentially have negative impacts on those jobs.

this is why I was asking about multiple styles and defaulting them to a specific template yesterday.

[Curtis_Waguespack · Accepted solution]

Hi drowlee ,

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@drowlee wrote:

So would I import or just open an autocad drawing?

---

 You use the Open button, then select the file, then click the Options button and choose Import, then you'll get all of the import options including the Destination for 2D Data options. Also see the Mapping Options button for Font mapping.

http://help.autodesk.com/view/INVNTOR/2014/ENU/?guid=GUID-740174D6-E394-4960-8348-B89B24DC831D

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@drowlee wrote:

We run everything out of the projects manager and our style is from a network location that we all use. We are also doing work for other companies who do not use their standard so changing the style would potentially have negative impacts on those jobs.

this is why I was asking about multiple styles and defaulting them to a specific template yesterday.

---

Okay, so in yesterday's thread I mentioned that since you're working with other companies, that it would be appropriate to create a new Standard in the Standard and Styles library and manage that Standard separately than your company Standard. I put this in bold to point out the difference in Styles and Standards. In your post above you refer to this as a Style, which might have just been a typo, but I  just want to clarify that a Standard is a collection of Styles, and you can have multiple Standards as shown in this picture, where I have 2 Standards, each of which contain different dimension Styles:

If you set up a Standard specific to this company you're working with, then you would then be able to make styles changes as need to just that Standard, without messing up the styles in your other Standard. And then you could set up templates that are specific to this particular company, by editing the templates, and going to the Tools tab > Document Settings tab > Standard tab and setting those templates to use a specific Standard.

You can also change the Active Standard for any drawing at any time by going to the Style and Standard Editor.

I hope this helps.
Best of luck to you in all of your Inventor pursuits,
Curtis
http://inventortrenches.blogspot.com

[Curtis_Waguespack · Accepted solution]

We run everything out of the projects manager and our style is from a network location that we all use. We are also doing work for other companies who do not use their standard so changing the style would potentially have negative impacts on those jobs.

this is why I was asking about multiple styles and defaulting them to a specific template yesterday.

[Curtis_Waguespack · Accepted solution]

Okay, so in yesterday's thread I mentioned that since you're working with other companies, that it would be appropriate to create a new Standard in the Standard and Styles library and manage that Standard separately than your company Standard. I put this in bold to point out the difference in Styles and Standards. In your post above you refer to this as a Style, which might have just been a typo, but I  just want to clarify that a Standard is a collection of Styles, and you can have multiple Standards as shown in this picture, where I have 2 Standards, each of which contain different dimension Styles:

[Curtis_Waguespack · Accepted solution]

[Curtis_Waguespack · Accepted solution]

If you set up a Standard specific to this company you're working with, then you would then be able to make styles changes as need to just that Standard, without messing up the styles in your other Standard. And then you could set up templates that are specific to this particular company, by editing the templates, and going to the Tools tab > Document Settings tab > Standard tab and setting those templates to use a specific Standard.

[Curtis_Waguespack · Accepted solution]

You can also change the Active Standard for any drawing at any time by going to the Style and Standard Editor.

[Curtis_Waguespack · Accepted solution]

I hope this helps.
Best of luck to you in all of your Inventor pursuits,
Curtis
http://inventortrenches.blogspot.com

[drowlee]

Thank you again. It isn't perfect quite yet but it works a bit better than how we were going about it. I appreciate the help from everyone.