Automated plotting in AutoCAD
Overview
Visual aids are important for developing a user-friendly design manual. The design team has manually created AutoCAD images to help users understand the plant designs. One major problem of this task, however, is that the developers need to regenerate the AutoCAD plots when they change a design of a single object in the system.
The major goal of this project is to automate the process of creating professional layout sheets in AutoCAD. The generated sheets will include not only drawings but also the dimensions and zoom scales of the models and the comments by the developers. Furthermore, the final layouts will be plotted into either JPEG or PNG files. The automation is based on AutoCAD features such as layout, dimensions, plots, and etc. More details of the used AutoCAD commands are shown in the next section. MtoATranslator program is updated with new AutoCAD commands. The other AutoCAD design scripts will be renewed according to the updated MtoATranslator.
Important AutoCAD Commands
Below is the list of the AutoCAD commands required for creating professional layout sheets.
To automate the layout creating process, updating MtoATranslator is necessary. The old MtoATranslator does not include layout creating commands such as layout, vplayer (view ports layer), and plot. In addition, because we want to include dimensions in our paper space, dimension and its related commands should be included. The testing version of the translator has worked successfully for layout and vplayer. More debugging is needed for plot and dimension.
Editing other modeling scripts
The modeling Mathcad scripts for sedimentation tank, flocculation tank, and other critical components of the plants should be updated. As updating of the MtoATranslator is completed, a few lines of scripts will be added in the modeling scripts to create paper spaces with desired plots.
Future Goals
The MtoATranslator should be constantly updated as new commands for paper space and plot are found. Also, with current information in AutoCAD, we can only generate one view in one paper space. Considering that the plants have many components, such methods can result in numerous layouts causing inefficiency of our codes. We need to find commands that create and edit multi view ports in the paper space so that we can put two or three minor components in one paper space.