Why Can't We Just Have Clean Drawings Always?

Now we are cleaning drawings of unreferenced registered applications (URA). What prompted this move is my frustration with drawings being yet again slow to load, slow to save and often difficult to work with. I ran the Purge command with the -R parameter (commandline method only) in AutoCAD 2008. After a few test runs manually and being satisfied with it, I created a shortcut key command.

It was truly amazing to me as to how many URAs there could be in a drawing. One client routinely has 180-190 URAs in their architectural floor plans. One of their 1st floor plans having a large floor plate for a condominium project with a civil site plan had over a thousand URAs. Once purged the mechanical floor plan would save in a few seconds instead of a couple minutes.

Passed that routine along to our CAD Manager and after a week or so she incorporated it into an older Purge routine I wrote that simply ran three times a general purge all command. She did replace the third cycle with the new URA purge sequence.

We also clean out all Layer Filters on incoming client drawings which also eat up a lot of file space and time during drawing manipulation. There have been times when the number removed was over 100. Result was a faster loading and manipulated drawing.

All that leads me to wonder why there is so much stuff stored with a drawing file. Does it make it easier to load? No unless other programs rely on this "feature". Easier to transfer when sharing with others? No. Just think of the lunacy of sharing drawing files over the Internet with all that garbage loaded. Lunacy. Sheer lunacy. As long as there is a way to clean the drawings of what we consider trash I guess it's okay but why isn't there the all-purpose strip-it-down-to-the-bone option for "one-command" cleaning?

Now as much as I gripe about clean drawings several of us in the office intentionally load up our drawings with previous graphical designs. While in Modelspace we copy our partial or entire design off to the side, out past the Viewport area, to retain information while we make changes for a modification triggered by a floor plan update or a potential change not yet fully accepted. On projects I've picked up from engineers no longer at the company there are often numerous copies of text and graphics that no longer have a purpose, especially when there are three or four copies of keynotes in various stages of complexity. If the degree of design change is significant I will work on a temporary copy of the entire drawing