Problems with drawings

Drawing in .DWG format from AutoCAD and BricsCAD can become a source of misery, ending up with stability issues and viral contamination of your drawing collection. You may want to consider to add an AUDIT command in the startup script. This part describes solutions for different problems.

Get rid of Educational plotstamps

It can happen to anyone, a drawing made with a normal version is accidentally saved in an educational version and you're stuck with a plot stamp forever. Right now there are some solutions:

• Be careful with saving when you are using an educational version of AutoCAD, keep these drawings outside the non educational environment.
• Faulty drawing: DXFOUT, new proper drawing, DXFIN or...
• New drawing, attach educational drawing as xref, bind and explode.
• In version 2015 there seems to be a built in option to import educational drawings.

Get rid of Autodesk FUD warnings

You may have seen warnings in AutoCAD saying this:

Non Autodesk DWG. This DWG file was saved by a software application that was not developed or licensed by Autodesk. Autodesk cannot guarantee the application compatibility or integrity of this file.

That gives you the creeps, right? Danger and alarm bells! Well it is simply bullshit introduced by Autodesk to try to scare you away from using competing products that sometimes even make better dwg files than AutoCAD. It is simply FUD.

Having said this you should understand that the warning comes from a header in a dwg file that determines if the drawing is from Autodesk or another vendor and there are some things you can do about it. Some solutions:

• Just ignore the warning that makes Autodesk ridiculous.
• You may want to set DWGCHECK to 0. This disables the message. It is one time registry setting but it may help to put a line in acaddoc.lsp for example.
• You may want to save the drawing if you're using a recent AutoCAD version in order to make it an Autodesk drawing. Please test this by opening the drawing again.

There are also some more in depth solutions:

• Several methods boil down to creating a new drawing header. These methods are:
  • WBLOCK the entire drawing, forcing it to write a new Autodesk header.
  • Copy and paste with base-point in a new drawing and save the lather
  • XREF in a new AutoCAD drawing, bind and save.
• BricsCAD users can save as .dwt, opening in AutoCAD goes without warning.

• Open and save in "TrueDwg Viewer" using DWGCONVERT to batch multiple drawings.

• More suggestions for BricsCAD can be found here.