topic Re: AutoCAD - Find Paperspace Drawings within Thousands of Drawing Files in AutoCAD Forum

AutoCAD - Find Paperspace Drawings within Thousands of Drawing Files

Anonymous — Wed, 23 Nov 2022 09:21:37 GMT

Hello!

I need to prepare about 27,000 drawing files for a document management system to create PDF renditions of those drawings. The document management system will, by default, plot the model space of each drawing. About a quarter of the drawings use paperspace though. So I'll need to pick out the paperspace drawings and adjust their plot settings in the document management system one-by-one.

What is a good way to find all the paperspace drawings out of the 27,000 drawing files?

Thanks!

Juan

[ The subject line of this post has been edited for clarity by @handjonathan Original: Find Paperspace Drawings within Thousands of Drawing Files ]

Re: Find Paperspace Drawings within Thousands of Drawing Files

Anonymous — Tue, 19 May 2015 20:53:52 GMT

Perhaps DATAEXTRACTION can help you track them down.

Re: Find Paperspace Drawings within Thousands of Drawing Files

Anonymous — Tue, 19 May 2015 21:17:44 GMT

Thanks, Patrick.

I'll give that a try. In the meantime though, could you explain how I would use DATAEXTRACTION exactly? I've never actually used it. Would it generate a table that will show me a list of files with layouts or what?

Thanks again!

Juan

Re: Find Paperspace Drawings within Thousands of Drawing Files

Anonymous — Tue, 19 May 2015 21:25:35 GMT

Juan, I've only used it a few times and I'm not exactly sure how to extract the existence of the layout - maybe if they are named layout, or the contents of a layout. But yes, it will create a table listing the files that contain the criteria that you define. It is easy enough to use but I would suggest running it against a small sample of your drawings.

Re: Find Paperspace Drawings within Thousands of Drawing Files

ВeekeeCZ — Tue, 19 May 2015 21:39:30 GMT

(layoutlist)

makes you list of current Layout names.

Then you need something like ScriptPro to run through all dwgs (or your management system?)

http://autodesk.blogs.com/between_the_lines/2012/06/scriptpro-for-autocad-32bit-and-64bit.html

Re: Find Paperspace Drawings within Thousands of Drawing Files

Anonymous — Tue, 19 May 2015 21:37:00 GMT

Patrick,

I went ahead and tested a couple paperspace drawings and I don't see a way to extract layout information with DATAEXTRACTION. You were on the right track though. Thanks for giving it a shot and showing me a new command.

Juan

Re: Find Paperspace Drawings within Thousands of Drawing Files

Anonymous — Tue, 19 May 2015 21:43:40 GMT

BeekeeCZ,

Thank you. I actually have come across (layoutlist) and tried it out. Unfortunately, model space drawings always have at least one empty layout and usually at least two empty layouts. So (layoutlist) will list even empty layouts. A drawing with empty layouts is a model space drawing, right?

A paperspace drawing would be one with one or more layouts with page setups and viewports applied to each layout.

I hope that made sense.

Juan

Re: Find Paperspace Drawings within Thousands of Drawing Files

ВeekeeCZ — Tue, 19 May 2015 22:07:29 GMT

I know. I gonna need a lisp routine for that. Maybe this by Kent Cooper.

Edit: Try this, is little modified.

(defun C:DAEL2 (); = Delete All Empty Layouts
  (setvar 'ctab "Model")
  (foreach layout (layoutlist)
    (if
      (or (not (ssget "_X" (list (cons 410 layout))))
	  (< (sslength (ssget "_X" (list (cons 410 layout)))) 2)); nothing in it but its paper space viewport
      (command "_.layout" "_delete" layout)
    ); if
  ); foreach
); defun

Found here.

Re: Find Paperspace Drawings within Thousands of Drawing Files

Anonymous — Tue, 19 May 2015 21:55:46 GMT

it was a shot in the dark Juan. After I mentioned it I tried it as well and didn't see a way of extracting layout information. Have you looked on Autodesk Exchange Apps for any kinf of plug-in?

If you find something then give ScriptPro a try as suggested. I don't know if ScriptPro works as it used to (opening an AutoCAD session for each drawing) - that would be horribly ineffecient and slow. If that's the case my CadTempo software has a batch script processor that might do the trick. You should be able to churn through 27,000 files during the free trial period.

Re: Find Paperspace Drawings within Thousands of Drawing Files

Anonymous — Tue, 19 May 2015 22:30:52 GMT

BeekeeCZ, your modified LISP routine works great. Thank you. It deletes all layouts with only one or zero objects. I would actually only want it to delete layouts with zero objects though because we do have paperspace drawings with only one viewport in the layout. I wouldn't want to delete those layouts. Could you modify the routine to only delete layouts with zero objects?

EDIT: I actually tried editing the routine myself. I'm just barely getting into LISP so bare with me please. So I changed the "2" to a "1" in the routine and it that seems to have worked. Now it deletes all layouts with less than 1 objects.

Patrick, I'll look through Autodesk Exchange. Thanks for the tip. I'll have a look at your CadTempo software too when it comes time to decide which program to use.

My day at work is over. I'll get back into this tomorrow.

Thank you both for your help!

Juan

Re: Find Paperspace Drawings within Thousands of Drawing Files

ВeekeeCZ — Tue, 19 May 2015 22:53:09 GMT

You need test it more. Because you probably cant erase all Layouts - even if you try so, AutoCAD recreates empty Layout1 automatically. Second - if you hit (accidentally) Layout tab when is one viewport created automatically (by default, but it could be turn off by settings). And third - selection of automatically made viewport contains actually 2 objects (both are viewport)...

Probably need figure out the other way to test if Layout was created on purpose or not.

Tested in AutoCAD 2015.

Re: Find Paperspace Drawings within Thousands of Drawing Files

Anonymous — Wed, 20 May 2015 13:44:49 GMT

Good morning!

BeekeeCZ, I'll definitely test out the routine before running it on all 27,000 files. I'll let you know how it goes. I'm also on 2015.

Thanks,

Juan

Re: Find Paperspace Drawings within Thousands of Drawing Files

Anonymous — Wed, 27 May 2015 21:07:32 GMT

Alright, This is the route I'd like to take now, but I need some help with the LISP routine. I'd like to RENAME all empty layouts (i.e. empty1, empty2) instead of deleting them so that I can easily filter them out when I export the list of layout names.

I've spent quite some time trying to modify the LISP routine BeekeeCZ provided, but I just can't get it. Here's the routine I'm using now:

(defun C:DAEL (); = Delete All Empty Layouts
  (setvar 'ctab "Model")
  (foreach layout (layoutlist)
    (if
      (or (not (ssget "_X" (list (cons 410 layout))))
	  (<= (sslength (ssget "_X" (list (cons 410 layout)))) 1)); nothing in layout
      (command "_.layout" "_delete" layout)
    ); if
  ); foreach
); defun

So is it possible to rename the empty layouts instead of deleting them?

Thanks!

Juan

Re: Find Paperspace Drawings within Thousands of Drawing Files

Anonymous — Thu, 28 May 2015 15:26:39 GMT

You can try with BatchInDatabase tool to find out the drawings which conains empty layouts without opening them

I could think of two ways now

Method one.

Use the command "Entity-Erase" and "All layouts" with only option "Include entity Type" which means delete entity which matches your selection.

The assemption is, the layout which is not empty may contains, line, polyline, block, text etc..., so I would draw one line, polyline and text and use the above command to select them from the current layout.

The steps to process the files

1. add your drawing in 500s or 1000s fro each batch

2. add the command "Entity-Erase" with above said scenario

3. add the command to all the loaded drawing in the batch

4. choose the option "Do not save"

5. run the batch process.

we are just testing the existance of objects , the log roports how many objects matches your selection in each layout which would givee you the clue which drawing contains empty layout.

if your layout contains Title block which name is same in all drawings then you can prefer the command "Block-Delete" with above steps

there is a command to delete or rename the layout like "Empty-1" "Empty-2" etc using the command "Layout-Find & Replace" but there is no option to add the condition to check them first and if they are empty then ranme it.

Method two.

Use the BatchInEditor tool which has command "Plot-Model" with option to plot only modelspace if paperspace is empty, so if you choose to create PDF files and you wll come to know which drawings has empty layouts.

you can think of many ways to figure out using the above tools.

Hope this will help.

Re: Find Paperspace Drawings within Thousands of Drawing Files

ВeekeeCZ — Thu, 28 May 2015 17:02:18 GMT

DAEL become to RAEL...

(defun C:RAEL ( / i) ;Rename All Empty Layouts
  (setvar 'ctab "Model")
  (setq i 0)
  (foreach layout (layoutlist)
    (if
      (or (not (ssget "_X" (list (cons 410 layout))))
	  (<= (sslength (ssget "_X" (list (cons 410 layout))))
	      1)); nothing in layout
      (command "_.layout" "_rename" layout (strcat "empty" (itoa (setq i (1+ i)))))
    ); if
  ); foreach
  (princ)
); defun

Re: Find Paperspace Drawings within Thousands of Drawing Files

Anonymous — Thu, 28 May 2015 17:58:06 GMT

abubakars,

Thank you for the information. I think BeekeeCZ's solution will work, but I'll definitely look into the "BatchIn" tools to see if they may be useful for other tasks inthe future. I've actually never heard of them.

BeekeeCZ,

Thank you so much for the new RAEL routine! I tried it on several drawings (model, paper, mixed) and it seems to work just fine. If I do happen to encounter any errors later, I'll post it here.

I tried for hours to edit the DAEL routine to rename instead of delete empty layouts, but being new to LISP I couldn't get it done. I'll have to study this new RAEL routine against the DAEL one carefully to understand what you did exactly. I see you added the "setq," "strcat," and "itoa" functions. I've already done a quick search online to see what those functions do and I've learned quite a bit throughout this process.

Thank you and everyone else for your help and sharing your knowledge. This forum and the others out there are invaluable. I hope to be able to pass on some of my own knowledge here as a way to pay it forward.

Thanks!

Juan

Re: Find Paperspace Drawings within Thousands of Drawing Files

ВeekeeCZ — Thu, 28 May 2015 18:17:40 GMT

You're welcome.

Nowadays almost everything was written somewhere. So If you don't know, just google it... (as I did, because I thought -RENAME command can do that... actually, it can't.)
If you have any question, don't hesitate to ask....

Re: Find Paperspace Drawings within Thousands of Drawing Files

Anonymous — Thu, 28 May 2015 18:43:00 GMT

Oh! I could have told you that and I would have felt smart. The LAYOUT command is the one you use to rename a layout, but you know that now.

I will test the RAEL routine a little more before using it on all 27,000 files and I'll update everyone on how it went.

Thanks again!

Juan

Re: Find Paperspace Drawings within Thousands of Drawing Files

Anonymous — Mon, 01 Jun 2015 14:02:08 GMT

Hello!

I just wanted to send a quick update to let everyone know how things are going.

So I have now run the RAEL lisp routine through about 12,000 files and it's going great. I'm using AutoScript from Cadig to run a script file that loads and runs the lisp routine on about 2,500 files at a time. After running the RAEL routine, I run another routine I found over at CADTutor to export the layout tab names for all the files onto an Excel spreadsheet. I then filter the spreadsheet to see a list of files without empty layouts (i.e. paperspace drawings).

That's it!

Thanks to everyone who helped.

Juan

Re: Find Paperspace Drawings within Thousands of Drawing Files

Jordy.van.koeveringe — Wed, 23 Nov 2022 07:54:06 GMT

Hi @ВeekeeCZ,

Last few days I have been working on trying to delete empty layouts from a numerous batch of drawings. I tried working according to the way @Anonymous did, but unfortunately this has not been working for me. As being new to Lisp and having difficulty figuring it out I hoped you could give me some advice here.

As juan.raven did I used 'Autoscript' to use the lisp routine on my drawings. The script is run without any errors, but nothing appairs to have changed. My drawings contain a A3 framework in the model space, the same framework with a viewport in Layout1. Layout2 & Layout3 are empty with just an empty paperspace viewport.

Hope you can tell me what I do wrong here.