Hello all,
Happy Holidays. I hope everyone enjoyed their Christmas as much as I did.
I've been quite busy with client work, new project for our company and all but despite my propensity to multitask, lisp ideas are always floating around in my head, waiting for time to free up and possibly come to fruition. I've been successful in many of such useful programs designed for the company I work at, in order to streamline, create standards, and most importantly, save time!
Without much more beating around the bush I will state my objective in creating this thread:
I am contemplating a one-command lisp-enabled "print job" (think a pre-set-up publish, to include all of the relevant documents: all of the .dwgs located within the same folder in which the current drawing resides.)
Step 1) Auto-include all of the ".dwg" in the folder in which the active document drawing resides. Put them into a list, display list in DCL dialog. Allow user to remove or add ".dwgs" to this list via the dcl. Allow for layout selection in the same manner that the publish tool does this. Though 99% of our documents are created in and use only model space, there are plans and section drawings that would use paperspace to notate and thusly would need to print from the layout tab, occasionally. Sometimes these same types of drawings but for different clients would indeed use only modelspace, but a viewport and then the text would go into modelspace. Different strokes for different folks, or clients. Whatever.
Step 2) Select plotter, plotstyle, etc. Preferably give an option for "Previous Plot" much in the same way that the plot dialog within autocad allows. I am fairly certain that lisp will allow for this except perhaps the "previous plot" portion, which would be vital. It's not saving much time if it has to be set up over and over when nothing about the plot style or any aspect of the plot style changes. We print in 11x17 landscape, all the time, for all jobs. Occasionally we have to print to a "D" or other less usual size, but I am not interested in using this tool for such print jobs. I merely want to save time for our most used, and most relevant plot style and printing methodology.
Step 3) Now that the sheets have beean added and the plotter is selected with the usual setup, which, honestly upon considering this more the entire plot setup dialog may not be required and could be replaced with a simple printer selection option (keeping all other aspects the same, unchanging, and standard) ((this refers to 11x17" paper, landscape, monochrome, fit to paper, centered aspect. All of those stay the same nearly all of the time but people do print to the printer that is closest to their machine, that's why I'd want to allow for printer selection.)) But once all of that is set up correctly the program should have a working and useful "save Job" function that will save all of the info for the next use.
Now I know this is really similar to the publish command. Some may ask "why make this why not just use publish"?
1) Time. The publish command often fails and leads to great frustration, if I could install a more streamlined version of the same tool that did half of the work for the user, they would be much more likely to use it properly.
2) "Sheet Sets" do not save properly for us. Not exactly sure why but multiple users have their CAD crash when trying to load a sheet set, this would be an acceptable workaround method that would allow them to save the time needed to open each drawing and print manually, or even the 1 other person in this company capable of writing a simple script to open, plot, save and quit....I think it'd be much better to have a working and useful tool that has some intelligence (or parameters that stay the same, a program designed with these parameters would indeed seem much more "intelligent" for printing an entire job than the vanilla publish tool for our company.)
3) Ease of use. Just because someone does not know how to use the publish command properly does not mean that my company should have to fork out their gross wages to do something as simple but time consuming as plotting 250 documents. The manual open, plot, save, quit method on this many drawings would honestly take 2-3 hours for most users here, and that's if they're moving quickly. A program like this that they could set up once and that would keep those settings for the entire time that they are working with the current job would be an invaluable tool for us, well, it's quantifiable in wages per hour as per how I described above.
The following is a code snippet from a utility that we use to save some time and that I believe would be useful for what I described above, in locating the parent directory of the active document drawing. Obviously this would just be one very tiny portion of the above program's entire code but hopefully it would be useful nonetheless.
(Defun c:foo ()
(startapp
(strcat "explorer /select, "
(getvar "dwgprefix")
(getvar "dwgname")
", /e"))
)
So okay, I think I'll hold here and wait for others thoughts. Is this a terrible idea not worth another moment of my time, and should I work towards gaining more understanding of the included publish command? Is this a good idea that may be useful for others for some or none of the reasons I've listed above??
I'd love to hear from the gurus on this one, pbejse, Lee Mac, BIGAL, etc etc etc love you guys. Happy holidays again!!!
....But of course and as always anyone is welcome to comment, complain, cry, confuse, cringe, be concerned, or any other C-words they feel are necessary. Why "C"? Christmas.
