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1992-12-06
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Draftsman's Helper Ver 1.0
By: Joe Thompson
8-2-92
Compuserve ID: 71321,1177
EET BBS Fido-net address 1:116/24
615-325-7800
Disclaimer and limit of liability
Joe Thompson makes no warranty of any kind, either express
or implied, including but not limited to implied warranties
of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose,
with respect to this software.
In no event shall Joe Thompson be liable for any damages
(including damages for loss of business profits, business
interruption, or loss of business information) arising out of
the use of this software.
Summary
The Drartsman's Helper is an Autocad ADS program that
draws several types of geometry including ANSI geometric
tolerancing symbols, drilled holes, tapped holes, counter-
bored holes, cap screws, flathead screws, and button head
screws. The Geometric symbols are stored as blocks in a
single drawing and xrefed in as needed. The other objects
are parametricaly draw as required. This system is highly
user customizable. All parametricaly drawn objects get
their required data from an ascii file stored in your
Autocad path. This file may be edited with new elements
added or deleted and old ones changed to any size required.
The program uses the autocad rel 12 dialog interface to
present the elements with slides and scrolling menus. The
user may add blocks to the drawing DHELPDAT.dwg and these
will automaticaly become part of the program the next time
it runs. This means that the user may add as many blocks
to the file as he needs to and the next time DHELP is run
these blocks will appear in the list box for selection and
insertion into the current drawing.
Caution! DHELP may not be ran from the drawing file DHELPDAT
because of the nature of how XREF's work.
There is also a radio button on the main DHELP dialog that
is labeled User blocks. This is a whole section of the
program alloted for only user defined blocks. The only
restrictions are that all blocks be inside DHELPDAT and that
the first three letters of the block name be USR. If you
wish to add geometric symbols the first three letter of your
symbols must be GEO.
This program uses extended data to retain its current position
in the menu system. This is completely transparent to the user
and translates to any time the program starts it takes you
back to exactly where you were when you last left the program
this counts from drawing session to drawing session to. So if
you are somewhere deep in a list, draw the component and exit,
and then exit the drawing, when you come back if it is the next
day or the next year when you start DHELP you will be in the
same position as you were when you last left.
I have also included a utility for generating slides from
blocks it is called
compile_slides
it is inside dhelp.exp and can be invoked by typing its name.
The utility only works on blocks but seems to do a fair job
of building slide libraries. The program deletes all non-block
objects in the drawing before it begins it then freezes all
objects , copies 1 block to a non frozen layer, finds the bounds
of the block zooms in on it and makes a slide. This process is
repeated for all blocks in the drawing. This program was developed
primarily to work with DHELP but it can be used for other things.
I have included two sample blocks in the drawing DHELPDAT as a
guide to how additional blocks may be added in the USER
category.
The process is fairly simple to add blocks and their corresponding
slides to the DHELP program. The process is this:
1. Create a new block in the drawing DHELPDAT. This new block
may be anything the user wishes. (Multiple blocks may be
developed and processed at one time).
2. Make sure that SLIDELIB.EXE is in the DOS path.
3. Run the compile_slides sub-program to build a slide library
of all new and current blocks.
4. End the DHELPDAT drawing.
5. Copy all files DHELPDAT.DWG, DHELP.SLB, DHELP.DAT, DHELP.DCL
somewhere into your Autocad path.
6. Open a new drawing or edit an existing drawing and your
new slides and blocks should be available inside the program.
Requirements
This program requires Autocad rel 12 or above.
Installation
To begin the program it must first be loaded into Autocad.
This is accomplished by typing the Autolisp command:
(xload "DHELP")
This command is required only once per Autocad drawing session.
Once the program is loaded it can be ran by typing:
DHELP
The program may be loaded automaticaly at startup by making
the following modifications to your ACAD.ADS file.
DHELP
If you do not have an ACAD.ADS file a simple ASCII text file
with the above line will do fine.