Autocad Mechanical compatability with plain Autocad

[Jesse_Newman]

I really like some of the features of Autocad mechanical, but the whole rest of my company uses the standard release. The help files mentioned that the DIMLFAC command is not really recommended because of Autocad compatability issues, which got me thinking... If my entire company is using plain Autocad, am I going to experience file compatiblity problems when they try to open my Mechanical files? Thanks.

[acwtzwegers]

Well, it may sound obvious... but it depends on how you define a "problem".

I have worked in this situation where others had ACM and I had regular, vanilla, ACAD and actually the problems lay mostly on the end of those that did use ACM: after I had opened, edited and saved their ACM drawing with regular ACAD, it would have lost many or all it's fancy ACM features - or I would have broken them.

In the end we actually were "faking" vanilla ACAD by just running ACM with a CUI change to replace all the ACM icons, but not it's support. The ones using "ACAD" then basically wouldn't notice the difference, while the ones using ACM wouldn't have their drawings messed up.

Personally I often prefer hybrid mixes of ACM and ACAD anyways, because some of the ACM versions of commands are just too annoying or weak compared to regular ACAD ones - and vise versa. (The ACM explode function for example will just explode 1 object if you have multiple selected, the ACAD one will actually work on the entire selection.) Obviously that only works on a ACM installation, not a ACAD one.

In the end it depends on budget and what you are actually doing with youer software. The situation above developped from a CAD manager being in the mechanical department of a company and then forcing ACM on all other departments - some of which had no use for it at all (or were even hampered by it). Personally I prefer to use the software most suited to what I'm doing - standarisation is not always the way to go.