I’m a design drafter. I create contract plans for construction. After the final plan sets are made, I hand the prints off to our archival team to put the drawings in their final home. Part of this process is printing a unique barcode sticker for each sheet. I didn’t realize that they went through such a tedious process to get this done until an associate at work came to me with an idea: why not print barcodes directly on the plan sheets? Read more »

I received this question from Erik about creating a Northing & Easting block with fields. Here is his question:

I find your post extremely helpful but I do have a question. I need my northing and easting to read a custom ucs (not world). Example, I’m giving a contractor a benchmark to work from which in world ucs is: N: 12213.19 E:-33516.2 but for ease we are setting that coordinate as N:0.00 and E:0.00 by making a custom layout ucs.
When I test the block it will only read out and display the world ucs even when I’ve set it to my custom ucs. Any thoughts? I want to place this block and have it read my custom ucs coordinate system instead of the world…

Great question Erik! Read more »

At the request of Murph, I will show you how to create a block that will display the bearing in degrees, minutes, and seconds (DMS) using an AutoCAD Field.

It’s actually very simple. Let’s get started. Read more »

Recently I was asked to create a grid that labels the Northings & Eastings on a map. There are a couple of ways you could do this: 1) If you have Civil 3D, create a point style that labels the Northing & Easting. 2) If you have AutoCAD create a block that displays the Northing & Easting with fields.

If you have Civil 3D, the point-style method works the best but today I am going to show you how to use fields to make this happen. Read more »

Like I’ve said before, there are multiple ways to setup Sheet Set Manager (SSM). This post shows just one way to do it. I setup SSM with AutoCAD 2008 for Seattle Public Utilities and Seattle Department of Transportation using this method. Read more »

Let’s say you have a piece of text that you want to automatically display the current date. Adding a field to text is the easiest way to do it. Read more »

Heidi Hewett’s blog is a good resource for learning how to use Sheet Set Manager. She has excellent documentation on setting up and using Sheet Set Manager.

More on Sheet Set Manager in the coming days…

Type FIELD on the command line and you will get this box:

Select a field name and format, such as the date field in this case, and the final result will look something like: Read more »