Plugin of the Month
-
A couple of weekends ago, shortly after returning from our trip to the States, I walked down to the area of Lake Neuchâtel that's nearest our house, called La Tène (which is now also the name of our local commune (or municipality), which was recently created as a result of fusing Marin-Epagnier with Thielle-Wavre… thankfully they didn't call it Marin-Epagnier-Thielle-Wavre ;-). On the way I stopped off to take a few photos of a local monument. La Tène culture is apparently quite famous in archeological circles, and the monument itself is pretty cool. It's a replica of an Iron Age…
-
Just a quick note to say Glenn Ryan's latest contribution, RefUcsSpy, is now live as August's Plugin of the Month. I posted a preview of the application a few weeks ago, and you can now get the compiled plugin with complete source project from the Plugin of the Month page on Autodesk Labs. Thanks, Glenn! 🙂 You'll note the posted plugin only claims support for AutoCAD 2009 onwards. This is because it relies on the Task Dialog implementation introduced in that version of AutoCAD. If you would like to get it working for prior versions of AutoCAD, you'll find an…
-
AutoCAD users who work with multiple reference files – whether DWG, DWF, DGN, PDF, PCG files or raster images – usually want them to be oriented in space (and to overlay) properly. One common way to make this happen is to set the various files up in world coordinates and then attach them at the origin of the referencing drawing's WCS. A common issue related to this approach is if the user happens to be in a local UCS: the file will get attached relative to that UCS rather than to the WCS. Glenn Ryan, who generously provided April's very…
-
I've been having a fun discussion with Augusto Gonçalves, based in São Paulo working for our DevTech Americas team, on the subject of QR Codes. Augusto's a technology junky – like many members of DevTech – and has been playing around decoding QR Codes with his mobile phone. QR (from "Quick Response") Codes are two-dimensional bar codes which encode data for later decoding using – very often, at least – some kind of handheld, mobile device. The most common reader applications use your device's camera to detect and analyse the composition of the QR Code, providing you with the decoded…
-
After seeing Shaan list the results of the latest AUGI wishlist, I started thinking about which of the items would be worth covering either on this blog or via a Plugin of the Month. The second item on the list, "Automatically Differentiate Manually Edited Dimensions", has (hopefully) been addressed by Dimension Patrol, this month's Plugin of the Month, so that's a good start, anyway. The first item, "Change Objects in a Block to a new Layer", seemed as good a good place to start as anywhere. Here's some C# code that builds upon a technique for selecting/highlighting nested entities shown…
-
Thanks again to Stephen Preston, our DevTech Americas Manager, for developing this very useful little utility. You can find an earlier version of this code – which I'd converted to C# and extended to cover text entities – in this previous post. June's Plugin of the Month is now live: Dimension Patrol for AutoCAD. This one was kicked off by a suggestion from Shaan Hurley: a tool for designers and CAD Managers to quickly check drawings for dimensions with overridden text (which, logically enough, could mean the dimensions no longer accurately reflect their associated distance or value). Sometimes the best…
-
Yes, I know, I know – we're halfway through the month, already. This plugin has been live on Autodesk Labs since the beginning of the month, but I've been a little distracted by April Fools' jokes, fooling around with Photosynth point clouds as well as finishing up some internal activities which always tend to take time away from blogging at this time of year. Anyway, I've been remiss talking about this very cool application, but at least Scott was there to announce it on day one. The application was developed by Glenn Ryan, and there are a number of notable…
-
The latest edition of AUGIWorld, the official magazine of AUGI (the Autodesk User Group International), has an article (written by me, which does indeed make this a shameless plug 🙂 on our Plugin of the Month initiative. Thanks to Mark Kiker and Marilyn Law for helping make this happen; it's great to get the word out to more people who'll benefit from these utilities.
-
I'm very pleased to announce the availability of this really interesting Plugin of the Month over on Autodesk Labs: Batch Publish for AutoCAD. Here's an excerpt from the ReadMe (which I happen to have written, but anyway): This plugin can be used with AutoCAD to simplify the process of publishing sets of drawings to DWF and/or PDF. It runs as a command within AutoCAD – as opposed to a separate executable – and uses a separate executable to monitor AutoCAD's health and restart it, as needed. The status of the batch publishing operation is stored to disk, allowing it to…
-
Firstly, a slightly belated "Happy New Year!" to all of you. I'm now easing back into the saddle after three very relaxing weeks off with family and friends. One of the first activities I had on my plate in 2010 was to tidy up the application I presented in this previous post and turn it into January's Plugin of the Month, FacetCurve for AutoCAD. The original C++ application this plugin is based on was generously provided by Jon Smith from COINS, a long-time ADN member (thanks, Jon!). You'll find the official announcement over on Scott's blog, in his trademark eye-catching…