Block Legend

[jvick]

Does anyone know how I can generate a legend of all of the blocks in my drawing. I'd like the block preview and name in columns. My goal is to be able to prevent purging blocks I want to keep, and also have a record of all blocks and names for reference.

[neaton]

The only way to do that is manually putting the block in the drawing and adding text with the name of the block. Use an mtext field to add the block name so you don't have to type them in. Good news is once you are done you can save them all as a block so they are always in your drawings so they don't get purged. 

There may be a LISP routine out there but I didn't see one.

Nancy

[Anonymous]

I found this vlx file on www.cadforum.cz. Not sure where it originally came from or who created it though.

Regards,

Peter

[Anonymous]

Link to the actual page is https://www.cadforum.cz/cadforum_en/automatically-generated-picture-legend-of-drawing-blocks-tip6724.

Don't worry though the lisp file runs in English.

Regards,

Peter

[jvick]

This only lists the blocks I've manually entered into the current drawing. I need a legend of all of the available blocks (if you type "insert" there's a long list of blocks that AutoCAD uses for storm structures and dynamic blocks) for my template legend. For Example: I would like to have a picture of each block and the name such that I can manage them - I have blocks with items on layers I don't want to keep being recreated every time I create a pipe network. Is there any to manage all of my blocks available?

[TerryDotson]

If you were to consider third party add-ons, take a look at DotSoft's C3DTools.  It generates (and updates) a symbol legend and/or linetype legend as CAD tables reflecting those objects actually used in the drawing.  The symbol legend can contain normal block inserts and/or symbols referenced by AeccCogoPoint objects along with optional count.

[cwr-pae · Accepted solution]

No really automated way to do this that I know of. Try using a tool palette to insert blocks as needed in conjunction with the pipe network parts list and a table as a legend with each block in a cell with a description next to it (have to set it up once, then insert as a block and exploded via tool palette) delete excess row of the blocks not needed and purge. This system works for me.

[revitpeon]

It's not fully automated, but you could use the method shown in this screencast to create the table, which is fairly painless as it places the block in the table and aligns it for you:

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/autocad/learn-explore/caas/screencast/Main/Details/f5684b6a-5...

When you use the insert a table command ("table"), you're given the option to insert from a data extraction.  In my case, I had one set up as I use this function, so I was able to extract all the blocks actually in use across all the project documents, then combine identical blocks, so that it took the legwork out of reviewing exactly which symbols I had inserted in all my documents.

Hope this helps someone.