Automate NX5 plotting

[Cheradanine]

Hi all, my company uses NX5 and I have been asked if I can help get an electronic copy of our drawings (currently we only have hard-copy drawings) our options are:

1) scan all the drawings - a huge job!
2) manually open and print the drawings (to pdf) - another huge job!
3) automate the opening, printing and closing of each assembly - sounds simple when written like this...


I read a few bits on this site about Macros and NX and also the API but can anyone give me a pointer as to the best way? Has anyone already done this? (I don't want to reinvent the wheel...)


Any advice / guidance would be appreciated.

 

[jerry1423]

I do not think there is a quick way to accomplish what you want, but I would strongly reccomend your #2. I feel the pdf files are the best quality and the best file size.

If there is a really good way to do what you are doing I would love to hear about it.

 

[hudson888]

Okay one thing that may help is that all sheets of a drawing can now be plotted in one step, but in the past if you had multiple sheets it was always a challenge for automating the plotting out of them. I would concur with Jerry above that PDF is one smart way to go, the next best would be HPGL. For automating with HPGL 1 to 1 scale is what it says, whereas different methods of creating PDF's may involve setting page sizes of the output (on the PDF side) that aren't as easily varied from within some NX internal macro, journal or other program.

Might I suggest that unless the numbers of drawings run to say more than a thousand that you'd probably be able to set up some macros and sit a work experience kid in front of a tube more cheaply than the time it might take to automate such a process.

On the other hand if you or any other person does or has developed a program by way of automation that will do this EVERYONE who uses NX wants a copy! I'm sure that after the number of times it has come up here that we'd be extremely annoyed if you didn't share something like that with us.

Best Regards

Hudson

www.jamb.com.au

Nil Desperandum illegitimi non carborundum

 

[jerry1423]

just a thought ...

There should be a cgm file imbedded in your NX5 files. There may be a way to access that and create a pdf from it.

 

[ufsure]

For exporting to PDF you can use journal. I have attached a c# journal that exports a drawing to pdf to the same directory as the part file. This can be expanded to suit your needs.

If you get stuck, record a journal and see what the code looks like. Once you are happy you can compile the journal into a executable program if you have the author license.

Regards,
Suresh

 

[hudson888]

That's great! I like it it works there's no problem there.

Any time you can get it to batch process a bunch of files then you'll have jumped that hurdle that we're all struggling with.

Best Regards

Hudson

www.jamb.com.au

Nil Desperandum illegitimi non carborundum