So I've been working on automating our title blocks to the greatest extent possible, so as to reduce the amount of work and chance for error in filling them out. 1st step was to incorporate the use of text fields. If you are not familiar with fields check them out they are very powerful. Basically fields reference text from a large variety of sources. The simplest of these sources falls under the document category, and references properties of the current drawing. Drawing properties can be accessed by the DWGPROPS command which brings up a dialog with 4 tabs, tab 1 is General and does not contain any editable data, tab 2 is Summary and contains Title, Subject, Author, Keywords, Comments, and Hyperlink base, tab 3 is Statistics and also contains no editable data, and last but not least tab 4 is Custom, and is the tab that I am interested in. If you pick the add button on tab 4 of the drawing properties dialog you will be able to add your own custom drawing properties and their default values. This is where I put the bulk of the drawing specific information that needs to be filled out in my title block, for example my custom properties are Cert1, Cert2, Cert3, Cert4, SurveyType, SurveyDate, SurveyDrafter. Now that I have these custom drawing properties in place I fire up the block editor and edit my title block, at each location where I used to have block attributes for the data that I just placed into my custom drawing properties, I will replace with a simple mtext or dtext object, fire up the appropriate text editor, right click, and select insert field which brings up the field dialog. On the field dialog select the document category, then select the appropriate custom property for the attribute that you are replacing, finally you can select the format for the field (Uppercase, Lowercase, First Capital, of Title case). Continue to do this for all of the attributes for which you made custom properties. That brings us to the end of the 1st step of automating the title block, now instead of having to edit the attributes of every insertion of your title block either as you insert them or later, you have a one stop place to edit them all simultaneously. In the next installment to follow shortly I will walk you through the slightly more complicated process of automating the Sheet # of TotalSheets using fields and a DIESEL expression to extract the sheet number from the Layout Tab name and a Lisp reactor routine that counts the total number of tabs for the Total Sheets field.
Regards
RRain
Randy Rain, post: 363512, member: 35 wrote: now instead of having to edit the attributes of every insertion of your title block
Maybe I just don't create enough drawing sheets to appreciate the value of the described approach, but it seems pretty involved. What I do is edit one title block with the info common to all sheets, then make as many copies of the layout tab as I need for the sheet count. I still have to edit the sheet number on each tab, but that's not exactly time-consuming.