AutoLISP Routines

Before a block is made from a set of attribute definitions, ATTORDER fixes the order they will be asked for in. What AttOrder does The order comes from where the ATTDEFs sit in the drawing database, and a window selection picks them up newest first. So a title block drawn in a sensible order gets its prompts in reverse, and one edited over time gets them in no … [Read more...] about ATTORDER LISP: Set the Order Attributes Are Prompted In

Three small conversions that AutoCAD has no command for. ARCTOCIRCLE completes an arc into the full circle it is part of. CIRCLETOARC goes the other way, cutting a circle back to an arc between two points picked on it. CIRCLETOELLIPSE turns a circle into an ellipse of the same size, ready to be squashed one way. What ArcCircle does All three keep the layer, … [Read more...] about ARCTOCIRCLE LISP: Convert Arcs, Circles and Ellipses

When you attach an xref, its layers appear in your drawing as XREFNAME|LayerName and you can change their colour, linetype, visibility and so on locally. Those local changes override the source. Over a long job that accumulates until nobody can remember which properties are the consultant’s and which are somebody’s local fiddling. What XrefRevert … [Read more...] about XREFREVERT LISP: Reset Xref Layer Overrides From Source

XRAY dumps every ActiveX property and method of a picked object to the text window. This is the single most useful tool there is when writing your own routines. What XRay does When you need to know what a piece of geometry actually exposes — what a dynamic block calls its parameters, whether a leader stores its landing point as a property or a DXF group, … [Read more...] about XRAY LISP: Dump Every Property of an AutoCAD Object

Click one piece of text, click another, and the wording moves across. WORDCOPY sends the first object’s text to the second; WORDSWAP exchanges the two. What WordSwap does What makes this worth having is the range of things it treats as “text”. Text and MText, block attributes, dimension text overrides, multileader text and multileader block … [Read more...] about WORDSWAP LISP: Copy or Swap Text Between Any Two Objects

A polyline with width is drawn as a thick line, but it is still stored as a single centreline with width values. Anything that needs the real shape — hatching the road surface, exporting the kerb face, trimming to the edge of a duct — needs that thickness expressed as actual geometry. WIDTHTRACE traces the visible edges and creates a genuine closed polyline around … [Read more...] about WIDTHTRACE LISP: Turn a Wide Polyline Into a Real Outline