CAD tip # 3649:

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CAD

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Shorter DWGs - I have a multi-megabyte drawing with 'almost nothing' drawn in it.

Make sure your large drawing contains no superfluous hatches (especially exploded hatches) or unused (unreferenced) blocks. Thaw and switch on all layers, zoom to full drawing. Do not forget the paperspace (layouts). Use PURGE to purge unused blocks and symbol table definitions (for nested blocks, several PURGE cycles may be needed, the commandline -PURGE version has more options). The AUDIT command can make more table entries purgeable.

There can be also invisible objects in your drawing - you have to make them visible first. The DBLIST command can help to identify these objects. They can be:

texts or attributes containing only "spaces"
faces with all edges set to invisible (some add-on applications make them)
blocks containing only invisible attributes
points with low visibility

Problem No.1 can be solved by setting the QTEXTMODE variable to 1; problem No.2 by setting the SPLFRAME variable; and problem No.3 by the ATTDISP variable. For the problem No.4, set the PDMODE variable to 3 and PDSIZE to 0. By temporary setting of these variables (and a regen) you can display the originally invisible entities. After modifications set the variables to their original values.

Make sure your blocks defined in the drawing contain really only the required symbols and not e.g. the whole drawing. This applies also for the dim-arrow blocks like _DotSmall or _Open.

Your drawing can also contain other non-graphical entities (custom objects, dictionaries, ...) coming from add-on applications (and the 'registered applications' themselves) or e.g. from the 'layer filters' function (frequent problem) or from excessive annotation scale lists. You can purge these using the corresponding functions (e.g. DeleteFilters, DBXremSL).

ACADLTMap

*CAD

8.3.2004 32119× FAQ

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applies to: AutoCAD · AutoCAD LT · AutoCAD Map 3D ·

See also:
Tip 10802:	Simplifying 3D drawings by replacing repeating 3D solids with blocks.
Tip 10544:	How to highlight polyline nodes and segments and directions?
Tip 8998:	How to make saving to older versions of DWG (SAVEAS) faster?
Tip 6910:	An alternative way of switching layouts.
Tip 2027:	What are the advantages and disadvantages of using ePlot DWF format vs. PDF?

Selected tip: Slow printing on HP DesignJet from Windows 2000 clients on Novell.

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