Designers who have been using AutoCAD for many years will agree that using a standard company AutoCAD template file to create drawings helps to build an engineering drawing library which is easy to navigate, edit and share. Using templates to create new drawings, sets up all the drawing standards making it very easy to follow company drafting standards.
What happens when someone changes or adds to the template settings? This often occurs if your company uses drawings supplied by outside vendors. They are using your company templates but they may add a layer or a new dimensional style during their editing process. This article is written to help diagnosis these drawings and flag the changes made to the template settings and assist you in changing them back to company standards.
AutoCAD has a built in drawing standards checker. You will find drawing standard commands under the Manage tab on the CAD Standards panel.
The first step is to open your company AutoCAD template and save it as an Autodesk Drawing Standard file which has the extension .dws. Place this file in your AutoCAD support file search path. You can come back at any time to update the configuration settings. Give it a name that identifies it as your company drawing standards master.
Next you need to open up your company template and configure it to use the previously saved AutoCAD Drawing Standards file. The first command you need to work with is “Configure”. This will open up the Configure Standards dialog box.
You will need to define the drawing standards file to be used every time a new drawing is created using your company template. Select the icon and browse to your .dws file. After selecting it, press “Open” to assign it to the dialog box. You may add as many .dws files as you desire but only the top one will be used. You can re-order them using the arrow keys. You will notice information about your .dws file in the right hand panel.
Next select the “Plug-ins” tab. This will show all the available plug-ins that can be selected to apply during the drawing standards checking process. You will probably want to use all of them but if not just remove the check mark(s). The red circle with the exclamation mark beside the “Dimension Style” plug-in is a mystery to me. If anyone reading this article knows what it is indicating, please post a comment on this post.
The next configuration dialog box is found by selecting the “Settings” icon at the bottom of the Configure Standards dialog box. The Notification Settings are used to prompt the drafter when they are violating a standard. The first selection is to turn off this feature entirely. The second option is to display an alert as soon as a standards violation occurs.
With the second selection the drafter will receive a notification similar to the one below. The second option is self explanatory and will result in a non-standard drawing. If you select the first one, you will be given the option to select one of the defined drawing standards to replace the style settings that was altered.
The third option will cause a balloon notification to appear on the status bar notifying you a viloation has occured. It will also place an icon on the status bar, which when selected, will execute a complete drawing standards check.
The Cad Standards Setting dialog has three options under the Check Standards Settings located on the lower part of the dialog box.
If the “Automaticaly fix non-standard properties” option has been checked the routine will compare the various style names from the configured standards drawing to the drawing being checked. If any style name matches, and needs to be corrected, the routine will do it automatically without prompting. This setting is very useful when some properties of the drawing styles has been changed but the name remains the same. For example the color of the object layer has been changed from a standard color of white to red. If this automatic switch is set, the standards checker will change it back to white without prompting you. If you would like to preview each standard check, remove the check mark.
The “Show ignored problems” should be checked to remind you if any of the standards violations were skipped during the checking process. You have the option of marking any standards violation as “Ignored” which allows you to pass up any changes to the standards at this time but will flag them for future review.
The “Preferred standards file to use for replacements” allows you to select a .dws file which will be used for standard replacements. This normally would be the same as the .dws file as the configured earlier which is associated to the current drawing.
After all configurations are finished all that is left to do is open a drawing that needs to be checked for standards violations and step through the prompts. As each violation appears, you will select the replacement standard from the list and select the “Fix” icon to move to the next. You have the option to mark it as ignored or skip it altogether using the “Next” icon.
You can start the Standards Check routine by selecting the “Check” icon or the icon in the Status bar (if you have configured this option).
After the routine has finished it will display a summary of the number of changes that were made.
One of the most valuable features of this process is that it will automatically purge layers and styles that do not belong in the drawing. This of course depends on you selecting “Fix” and not skipping the standards violation. The process also works with the layer of entities within blocks and nested blocks. After the routine is finished, always run the “Regen” command to refresh the drawing layers and other styles.
Below is a short video of running the Standards Checker on my final drawing.