AutoCADderTuesday, November 27, 2007
The cure for ever growing annotation scales in AutoCAD 2008
If you use AutoCAD 2008, you are probably suffering the same problem - attached xrefs bring in their annotation scale lists and the scale list in the main drawing grows ad infinitum. There can be thousands of nested scales named "XREF_XREF_XREF....".
Such scale lists confuse users (see the SCALELISTEDIT command) and can substantially slow down Open and Xref operations on such infected DWG files. The latest Service Packs for AutoCAD 2008 applications seem to fix the main problem. But what to do with the already affected files? Yes, there is the SCALELISTDEL Reset option or you can use LISP tools like ScaleListDel but still you will have to open the drawings one by one and some of them can open really slooooowly.
The tip Batch remove annotation scale lists may be the cure - the DBXremSL utility does not open the DWG file to fix it - instead, it uses a faster DBX access and modifies all DWG drawing files in a given folder.
The Readme file to DBXremSL mentions a "Safe mode" - I would recommend making this Safe mode the default one so it removes only those scales which were brought-in from Xrefs.
Such scale lists confuse users (see the SCALELISTEDIT command) and can substantially slow down Open and Xref operations on such infected DWG files. The latest Service Packs for AutoCAD 2008 applications seem to fix the main problem. But what to do with the already affected files? Yes, there is the SCALELISTDEL Reset option or you can use LISP tools like ScaleListDel but still you will have to open the drawings one by one and some of them can open really slooooowly.
The tip Batch remove annotation scale lists may be the cure - the DBXremSL utility does not open the DWG file to fix it - instead, it uses a faster DBX access and modifies all DWG drawing files in a given folder.
The Readme file to DBXremSL mentions a "Safe mode" - I would recommend making this Safe mode the default one so it removes only those scales which were brought-in from Xrefs.
Labels: annotation scale, AutoCAD 2008, batch, DBX, DWG, Xref
