In my opinion, one of the MOST underutilized features of AutoCAD is the hyperlink.
Why is it underutilized?
Well because it's clunky, slow, and doesn't seem usefully implemented to most people. To create a hyperlink, you need to click an object that you want hyperlinked, then browse to a file or add URL, then when you want to view that hyperlink, to have to Ctrl + Click, THEN sometimes AutoCAD decides to minimize itself while opening the hyperlink.
Why use hyperlinks if they're so clunky?
In a world where so much information is available at your fingertips, I have a very strong philosophy when trying to customize my AutoCAD environment:
Provide as many useful resources / tools to the AutoCAD user as possible that Prevent them from having to utilize / navigate other programs.
What does this mean? Well, for example, if we can add a note inside of AutoCAD instead of having to create a separate "README.txt" file, then this saves the user from having to navigate in File Explorer and open Notepad, when they could have the information available to them directly in AutoCAD... If you can add an image or snip and paste it into AutoCAD so that a user does not have to navigate to look at that resource, then that saves the user from having to navigate other programs also.
HYPERLINKS ALLOW USERS TO EASILY RETRIEVE EXTERNAL DOCUMENTS / INFORMATION WITHOUT HAVING TO LEAVE THE AUTOCAD ENVIRONMENT.
Then what's the problem you're trying to solve?
Hyperlinks have 2 problems in my opinion:
1) They're slow/difficult/unintuitive to create.
2) They're NOT useful to view with Ctrl + Click and only 1 at a time.
...I have created a solution for Problem #2, called Perfect Preview
What is Perfect Preview?
Perfect Preview evolved from a niche problem I was having when trying to view site photos, as seen from this post. My Photo Preview command was so effective within our company that it resonated with me that this could help us view MORE than just Photos from within AutoCAD; Why not PDFs? Why not text files? Audio files? Video files? etc. All of our users could be SO much more informed in a faster manner than having to navigate multiple times to resources that they could have available to them from right inside of AutoCAD.
How does it work?
When you run the PERFECTPREVIEW command (PP for short), you will be prompted to select ANY HYPERLINKED OBJECT. Literally anything with a Hyperlink (which can be ANY visible entity in AutoCAD). Then, the code will determine generally what the hyperlink is linking to (Image, PDF, url, txt file, etc). A Temporary HTML file is created via the (vl-filename-mktemp ...) function. And then we open the HTML file as a Tool Palette via the JavaScript API (see image below).
How should I use Perfect Preview?
Well, that's part of the beauty of it. If you want to have external resources available to you from within AutoCAD, then create a Hyperlinked object, then use Perfect Preview to easily view those items. I currently create special blocks that look like icons which I hyperlink to documents, images, etc.
But creating hyperlinks is slow...
Yes, This is problem #1 with hyperlinks and I hope to be creating some tool to help fix this in the future!
Try Perfect Preview for yourself!
I have attached the Lisp file "PERFECTPREVIEW.LSP"
Screenshot:
Live in Action:
Hope this helps somebody!
Best,
~DD
