It has been a while since I have written code (I am a mechanical engineer) but I think this is a simple problem. At my job we put things in various rows and we need to be able to quickly classify rows. Let me explain: we will get an autocad file shown rectangles in rows like the following. Note when I am talking about rows I am talking about the up and down rectangles (Opposite of row/ column in spreadsheet sense).
I need to color code and count rows of the following distinct categories:
- Long Length Exterior rows (Rows that have less than 3 rows to the right and/or left of them )
- Long Length Interior rows( rows that have other rows 3+ to the left and 3+ to the right)
- Long length Overhang rows (rows that have short length rows in front of them, similar to exterior row rules 3 rows from the left or right will be considered an overhang row)
- Short length exterior rows (same rules as exterior/ interior for long length rows)
- Short length interior rows (same rules as exterior/ interior for long length rows)
Currently we manually color code them into different layers then we can use autocad to count the rectangles in each different categories see color coding below:
Blue= Long Row Exterior Magenta= Long Row Overhang Red= Long Length Interior Green= short length interior Cyan= short length exterior.
This is easy enough for small files but these get very large and tedious for large sites, and to further complicated things, sometimes there are 3 length categories (short, medium, and long). Looking for an easy way to automate this process, I dabble in C++ and VBA and I feel like this should be rather simple, I just don't know where to start. this does not need to be done withing Auto cad and I can export the files as images or whatever is necessary.
