Watch out for character wrapping inherited from the AutoCAD text window. An empty line is equivalent to you pressing ‘Return’ on your keyboard, so leave those empty lines in! In the image below I have highlighted what can be stripped out.

You don’t need AutoCAD’s command line prompts. The next step is to edit out what you don’t need. Copy the commands from the AutoCAD text window, and paste them into your notepad file. The next step is to open a new blank notepad file (Please don’t be tempted to use Word or another word processing programme for this!). When we have produced a plot manually, we can open up the text window (hit F2 on your keyboard) to review the steps. You may have to step through the routine a few times to get all the answers you need.

Copy these options out into a text file for later reference. Tip: If you don’t know the answer to the question AutoCAD is asking you, type ‘?’ at the command line and hit return to see a list of available options. To this end we will use the command line version of the plot command ‘-PLOT’ (the hyphen suppresses the plot dialogue) and we will manually step through the options to produce our plot. Recording the stepsĪutoCAD script files cannot interact with dialogue boxes, so we need to work out what we would type at the command line to produce our plot. We will work through the instructions that we would usually need to give AutoCAD to make a plot, and make a note of them so that we can write it up into a script. In this example we will write a script file that will create an A1 PDF plot of a drawing. Defining a processīefore we can automate a process, first we have to define it. AutoCAD script files always have a file extension of ‘.scr’. To AutoCAD, a script file is an ASCII text file that contains a set of command line instructions for AutoCAD to follow – just like an actor reading from a script. In computer programming terms, a script is a programme that will run with no interaction from the user. In this example we will write a script that will automate a typical plot routine. In this post, I will demonstrate how to write and develop a script for AutoCAD. One of the easiest ways to automate a process within AutoCAD is to write a script. If you’ve ever had to do the same thing with AutoCAD twice – think about how you could automate it so you never have to do it again. If you can establish a technical drawing process that you perform frequently – you can automate it with AutoCAD. One of the great benefits of using AutoCAD to create your technical drawings is the ability to adapt AutoCAD to suit your company’s processes.

How could you use AutoCAD Scripting to automate your workflow?.Adding Comments (putting some junk back in).

How to make a .scr file