TheSwamp
CAD Forums => CAD General => Topic started by: Willie on September 03, 2007, 09:37:13 AM
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Check out http://www.glamsen.se/CadTools.htm (http://www.glamsen.se/CadTools.htm) for a handy free cad add-on called CADTools. Some of the function are great, some are Vanilla commands.
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Willie, who wrote the software ?
I thought this was interesting ..
' CadTools is an out of process software and ... '
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Hi Kerry
I'm not sure who the authors are and I dont know where I found the link to the software. I'm just happy that someone has taken a big load of my shoulders with it.
I think some of the funtions may be aviable in Civil 3D. We are in the process of upgrading to Cilvil 3D.
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Willie, who wrote the software ?
I thought this was interesting ..
' CadTools is an out of process software and ... '
It is indeed interesting Kerry. I have a fresh install of Acad / Civil 3D 2008 and decided to see exactly what happens when this is installed. I found an amazing thing virtually unheard of for AutoCAD add ons lately. Installing this package does absolutely nothing to my AutoCAD install - no trace of any extra menu, toolbar, or even a search path addition. It is a stand alone program that right now has a menu with toolbar running on my desktop with no AutoCAD running at all. It has an option for r2000-r2007 support or r2008 support that can be selected and changed at will. It is apparently crippled to some extent with the free download but promises to provide a registration code for full functions with any size donation.
As for the tools themselves, a number of them seem to be duplicates of functions within the civil verticals or even in expresstools but the package seems very promising for someone without access to those vertical products. There also appears to be functions that transfer data to Excell and I think there may be a few functions in the registered version not yet available for Civil 3D or Land Desktop.
Thank you Willie for sharing this . . . it looks like a very promising find.
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This software, appears to be similar to this one (is in Spanish):
http://topoligonar.galeon.com/
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This software, appears to be similar to this one (is in Spanish):
http://topoligonar.galeon.com/
Here is the translated page:
http://tinyurl.com/33qdwy
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Pretty interesting concept. Write an external program that grabs the running version of autocad? How is that possible
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Pretty interesting concept. Write an external program that grabs the running version of autocad? How is that possible
In VB, it's the 'Application Object', or something to that effect.
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Now what would be really cool would be to set it up to work w/ LT. Someone could market that as addons for LT
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I don't think LT provides VB "Objects", otherwise this would have been done a long time ago.
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What objects are you getting? I thought the out of process meant it wasn't connected to Autocad. Wouldn't you just need the application?
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These tools connect to AutoCAD via COM, the same way you would connect to AutoCAD from an app like Excel. AutoCAD LT doesn't have a COM interface.
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These tools connect to AutoCAD via COM, the same way you would connect to AutoCAD from an app like Excel. AutoCAD LT doesn't have a COM interface.
Are you referring to the original program from the start of this thread, the one Luis referred to or both? Is there any sort of performance penalty or other considerations with connecting to AutoCAD in this way? It seems to a very different way of connecting than most of the add-on programs I see and if it does work as well, I am wondering why more applications do not use this method rather than modifying the existing AutoCAD installation to work inside it.
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These tools connect to AutoCAD via COM, the same way you would connect to AutoCAD from an app like Excel. AutoCAD LT doesn't have a COM interface.
Are you referring to the original program from the start of this thread, the one Luis referred to or both? Is there any sort of performance penalty or other considerations with connecting to AutoCAD in this way? It seems to a very different way of connecting than most of the add-on programs I see and if it does work as well, I am wondering why more applications do not use this method rather than modifying the existing AutoCAD installation to work inside it.
I didn't even look at either program other than looking at the site in the original post. If it's an out of process application than that means it's a separate process which communicates with AutoCAD via the COM interface. This method has major performance issues.
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. . . This method has major performance issues.
Thanks, that says it all. I really liked not having it mess with my install but if the penalty is too great it is not worth it. I have not had time to use the program yet to gauge any such problems but I have it on such an underpowered system they should be apparent rather quickly.
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This method has major performance issues
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I really liked not having it mess with my install but if the penalty is too great it is not worth it.
I'm of 2 minds about this issue.
I think it depends on the type of work being done.
If it works to your satisfaction , and is economical you could take the attitude 'that half of something is better than all of nothing'
The performance hit may be no more than the time it takes for some people to find a key on a keyboard (to put it into perspective)
... and providing the result is what you want, I'm sure it would be faster than working manually, yes ?
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This method has major performance issues
.
I really liked not having it mess with my install but if the penalty is too great it is not worth it.
I'm of 2 minds about this issue.
I think it depends on the type of work being done.
If it works to your satisfaction , and is economical you could take the attitude 'that half of something is better than all of nothing'
The performance hit may be no more than the time it takes for some people to find a key on a keyboard (to put it into perspective)
... and providing the result is what you want, I'm sure it would be faster than working manually, yes ?
Very true, it all depends on the type of work being done. For some tasks it is acceptable, and I even use it for some things. But for others it's a real dog. I have some stuff that searches for drawings on our document management server via a com interface. For 1-15 drawings it works great, but anything more it's awful. To search the whole repository it takes 15+ hours. :oops:
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Absolutely Kerry . . . I am facing the very real possibility of having to turn to a solution such as this if my employer pulls the plug on our Civil 3D experiment as he is threatening. Should that happen, I don't know what solution will be found, but I assure everyone that it will NOT be stick building the entire document set in unassisted vanillaCAD which seems to be my supervisor's preference. Even Civil 3D can be incredibly doggy at times so some of the bars are not set very high in this comparison. I am actually more concerned with the quality of the results than raw speed as I find myself more often than not being the true bottleneck in the process.
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To anyone interested, I started to update an application for Civil/Topo - as an open source C++/MFC/ARX here:
OpenCivilPack 1.0 - For AutoCAD 2007-8
http://www.theswamp.org/index.php?topic=18631.msg228044#msg228044