MikeHalloran
Mechanical
The boss has some interesting ideas. He is, of course, the boss.
Our drawings don't have title blocks. What they have instead is an incredibly long and descriptive file name, that reads sort of like an Army description of a simple object. A hypothetical example might read like:
"Box 20in x 20in x 8in NEMA 4 steel wall mount left hinge right paddle latch gray with white panel.dwg". That would be a master template. Each project would get a customized version, so the project's directory would have a drawing with even more text in the title, comprising the project number xxxx-yy, the contractor's name, the owner's name, the site's name, and maybe some identifying information beyond that.
Additionally, the drawings are stored in a directory tree that is excessively deep and excessively wordy, with directories having names like "Engineering Database", "Drawings", "Customer Database", deeply nested, and again with project number/contractor/..etc all concatenated.
[ There is a certain logic to the system. If the boss, a known computerphobe, can conjure up part of a project or item's description, Windows Explorer can find it; you don't need a browser that can search for text inside CAD files. ]
No way could you back up any of this stuff on an ISO CD, because the filenames and pathnames are way too long. We don't do backups, of course, and I don't even want to discuss that.
What's driving me crazy is that, thanks to templates and projects derived from similar projects and suboptimal discipline, there may be hundreds of sets of six or eight or twenty files with the same name, or with names that are identical for the first hundred characters or so, spread all over the server.
Some of them do differ from one another, but you can't distinguish the filenames from one another in Windows Explorer without scrolling. That's a minor problem, though.
In AutoCAD, you can't distinguish them from one another at all, because the filenames don't fit in the title bar of a window; they are truncated with ellipsis...
Okay, you say, AutoCAD has system variables that hold both filename and pathname. Except ... DWGNAME and DWGPREFIX are truncated with ellipsis in the text window.
The ellipses imply that the entire name and the entire path are somehow stored, but they're not accessible by any means I have conjured so far. All I want to do is extract the whole filename and the whole pathname from the drawing file, and paste them into the drawing field, so when you look at the screen or a print, you can tell which file you're looking at, and where it is. Transcribing them character by character between Windows Explorer and AutoCAD is just too laborious and error- prone.
Anyone?
Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA
Our drawings don't have title blocks. What they have instead is an incredibly long and descriptive file name, that reads sort of like an Army description of a simple object. A hypothetical example might read like:
"Box 20in x 20in x 8in NEMA 4 steel wall mount left hinge right paddle latch gray with white panel.dwg". That would be a master template. Each project would get a customized version, so the project's directory would have a drawing with even more text in the title, comprising the project number xxxx-yy, the contractor's name, the owner's name, the site's name, and maybe some identifying information beyond that.
Additionally, the drawings are stored in a directory tree that is excessively deep and excessively wordy, with directories having names like "Engineering Database", "Drawings", "Customer Database", deeply nested, and again with project number/contractor/..etc all concatenated.
[ There is a certain logic to the system. If the boss, a known computerphobe, can conjure up part of a project or item's description, Windows Explorer can find it; you don't need a browser that can search for text inside CAD files. ]
No way could you back up any of this stuff on an ISO CD, because the filenames and pathnames are way too long. We don't do backups, of course, and I don't even want to discuss that.
What's driving me crazy is that, thanks to templates and projects derived from similar projects and suboptimal discipline, there may be hundreds of sets of six or eight or twenty files with the same name, or with names that are identical for the first hundred characters or so, spread all over the server.
Some of them do differ from one another, but you can't distinguish the filenames from one another in Windows Explorer without scrolling. That's a minor problem, though.
In AutoCAD, you can't distinguish them from one another at all, because the filenames don't fit in the title bar of a window; they are truncated with ellipsis...
Okay, you say, AutoCAD has system variables that hold both filename and pathname. Except ... DWGNAME and DWGPREFIX are truncated with ellipsis in the text window.
The ellipses imply that the entire name and the entire path are somehow stored, but they're not accessible by any means I have conjured so far. All I want to do is extract the whole filename and the whole pathname from the drawing file, and paste them into the drawing field, so when you look at the screen or a print, you can tell which file you're looking at, and where it is. Transcribing them character by character between Windows Explorer and AutoCAD is just too laborious and error- prone.
Anyone?
Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA
