topic Re: How to reduce the size of drawings/delete double lines in AutoCAD Forum

How to reduce the size of drawings/delete double lines

Vinicius_Resende5AN7D — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 13:24:12 GMT

Sometimes i have to download some electrical devices' DWG from the manufacturer's website, or in most of the cases from CADenas. This 2D view drawings come with a lot of lines and are quite "heavy" for the software i use to handle them. Is there a easy way to reduce the size of this drawing or to eliminate the lines that are duplicated?

The software which i upload this drawings only acceps AutoCAD 2004 format for DWG and it's used for eletrical projects.

Re: How to reduce the size of drawings/delete double lines

pendean — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 13:36:44 GMT

@Vinicius_Resende5AN7D wrote:
...are quite "heavy" for the software i use to handle them. ...
...The software which i upload this drawings...

Do you have AutoCAD? I can't tell from your post. If not...

You'll need to ask that other software's maker for support, and/or find a library of blocks that offer cleaner content: your 132kb file containing 613 small objects looks to be a flattening of a 3D object, that is how that website decided to create their 2D content. Not sure there is free software to go all the work to clean a library of blocks out there.

Conversion to R14 format you can do yourself in the free viewer/converter from Autodesk here if you also do not have autocad

https://www.autodesk.com/products/dwg-trueview/overview

Re: How to reduce the size of drawings/delete double lines

Vinicius_Resende5AN7D — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 14:03:12 GMT

Yes, i use AutoCAD 2024 version...

Re: How to reduce the size of drawings/delete double lines

Kent1Cooper — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 14:07:56 GMT

I only see 401 objects, but still.... OVERKILL reduced that only a little, to 374, though that could vary with settings. That would be because things don't actually overlay each other much, but a lot are unnecessarily multiple objects close together. I don't know of a way to reduce that except manually -- if a routine could be made to recognize proximities like that, how could it know which one of multiple close objects to keep? Not much help, perhaps.

Re: How to reduce the size of drawings/delete double lines

pendean — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 14:57:57 GMT

@Vinicius_Resende5AN7D wrote:
Yes, i use AutoCAD 2024 version...

You could take the time and clean up the block (like manually erasing these pointless not-quite-overlapping identical elements)

Then use JOIN command everything, then use HATCH command with boundary (and a fudge factor) or BOUNDARY command (all on a unique layer) to basically rebuilt the blocks from scratch, then lock that layer before you ERASE all the original content on layer zero. You should end up with far fewer elements.

Repeat for every block you grab from that website.

But is that really worth it for your other program? Would a dumbed down 'representation' of the object not be sufficient enough?

Q: if you have "electrical' drafting needs, do you not find the free-with-subscription variant AutoCADMEP (or even AutoCADELECTRICAL if this is an infrastructure project) useful over that older 3rd party software?

Happy cleanup: you have a lot of work ahead of you.