Every practice has a master list of notes — the hundred-odd paragraphs that appear on drawing after drawing. Retyping them invites typos; copying them from the last job propagates whatever was wrong on the last job. NOTEBOOK reads them from one file that one person maintains.
What NoteBook does
The notes file is plain text. A line beginning with a dollar sign and a number starts a note; everything after it belongs to that note until the next one begins. A line beginning with an asterisk is a section heading and is not itself a note.
* CONCRETE
$1
All concrete shall attain a minimum compressive strength
of 25 MPa at 28 days unless noted otherwise.
$2
Reinforcement shall comply with AS/NZS 4671.
Notes do not have to be in order and the numbers do not have to be contiguous — gaps are normal as a library grows and notes are retired.
How to use it
- Load the routine with
APPLOAD, or put it on your support file search path. - Point it at your notes file.
- Type
NOTEBOOK. - Ask for notes by number in any mix of singles and ranges:
1,3,5-9. - Give the first drawing number and pick a point.
How it works
Library numbers are not drawing numbers. Note $47 in the library might be the third note on this drawing, so it gets numbered 3. You give the first drawing number and the notes are numbered up from there, in the order you asked for them.
Ranges are expanded and the whole list de-duplicated, so 1-5,3 gives five notes rather than six.
The file is read once per command, into a list held in memory. Reopening and re-scanning it for every single note inserted means fifty passes over a fifty-note file.
The number sits in its own column to the left of the note text, so wrapped lines line up under each other instead of under the number.
Any note you ask for that is not in the library is reported at the end, rather than silently skipped. A missing note on a drawing is a lot more expensive than a message on the command line.
Notes and limits
- One file, one maintainer. That is the point — the value is in nobody keeping their own copy.
- Text height is DIMSCALE × 0.15 unless the current style has a fixed height, in which case the style wins.
- Line spacing and the number column are multiples of the text height, so the block scales as one.
- Missing notes are reported, never dropped quietly.
Download and details
| Name | NoteBook — keep standard notes in one file and place them, numbered |
| Download | NoteBook.lsp — 17.5 KB, plain AutoLISP source. Downloads directly; no zip to unpack. |
| Type | AutoCAD AutoLISP routine |
| Command | NOTEBOOK |
| Requires | nothing beyond a CAD platform with AutoLISP. |
| Source size | 17.5 KB, 403 lines |
| Error handling | Yes — a *error* handler restores every system variable it changed, on cancel as well as on error. |
| Undo | The whole operation is wrapped in a single undo group, so one U reverses all of it. |
| Compatibility | AutoCAD (any release with AutoLISP), BricsCAD, ZWCAD, GstarCAD, ProgeCAD and other IntelliCAD-based platforms. AutoCAD LT needs a LISP enabler. No .NET, no ObjectARX, no installer. |
| Author | YZ, August 2026 |
| Licence | Free to use, supplied “as is” with no warranty. |
References
- Engineering drawing abbreviations — an A-Z list of 369 of them
- TEXTRAIL LISP — aligning the notes once they are placed
- Text heights in drawings — what height notes should be
- More free AutoLISP routines on this site
- Wisey’s Steel Shapes — free structural steel section drawing program