It is Alive in the Lab

December Plugin of the Month: Layer Reporter for AutoCAD

Q: What do an AutoCAD drawing and a piece of cake have in common? A: They both have layers and are sweet!

The ADN plugin of the month for December is the Layer Reporter for AutoCAD 2007 (and later) that was written by Terry Dotson, from DotSoft, and edited by Kean Walmsley for publishing on his blog: Through the Interface.

Free Download of Layer Reporter for AutoCAD (includes source code too)

The plugin generates a report of the layers used within an AutoCAD drawing. The report formatting can be customized and the customized settings are applied when the tool is used on other drawings. The resulting report can be printed or saved to a web page (HTML or MHT) or plain old text file.

Sweetening the pot to help others to develop their own plugins is alive in the lab.

November Plugin of the Month: Screenshot for AutoCAD Now Available

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder - so share your beautiful designs as images.

I was on sabbatical until yesterday, so I am a little bit tardy with the November plugin of the month. This month's Autodesk Developer Network plugin comes to us from our own Kean Walmsley and provides a screenshot capability for AutoCAD.

Free Download of Screenshot for AutoCAD on Autodesk Labs

From the read me: "This plugin can be used with AutoCAD to simplify the process of capturing images of parts of drawings, or the entire drawing or application windows. It optionally allows you to remap the background to white and the foreground to black, and convert the entire image to grayscale, as well as sending the capture image directly to a printer."

The plugin works with AutoCAD 2007 and later versions. This applies to vanilla AutoCAD as well as AutoCAD-based products. So please give it a shot and let us know what you think at labs.plugins@autodesk.com.

Celebrating the sharing of another plugin (including its source code) is alive in the lab.

October Plugin of the Month: Clipboard Manager for AutoCAD Now Available

We have our second plug-in of the month. Following in the footsteps of the Offset in XRef plugin, this month we bring you the Clipboard Manager for AutoCAD. This plugin was written by Mark Dubbelaar and edited by Kean Walmsley for publishing on his Through the Interface blog. The plugin can be used with AutoCAD to manage multiple clipboard entries, storing and renaming them for later use. Once loaded, the CLIPBOARD command displays the Clipboard Manager palette. When using Ctrl-C (or COPYCLIP) inside AutoCAD, this palette displays each new set of AutoCAD objects added to the clipboard.

You can download the plugin from the Autodesk Labs site:

Free Download of Clipboard Manager for AutoCAD on Autodesk Labs

For those who wish to download last month's plugin, the Offset in XRef plugin, you can find a download link to this plugin on the Plugin of the Month Updates page under the HISTORY section. As we add a new plugin to the main page each month, we will move the link to the previous plugin to that page. This way the main page features the plugin of the month, but you can still access all of the previous plugins if you need to. That's how we roll.

So please try out the Clipboard Manager for AutoCAD and let us know what you think at labs.plugins@autodesk.com. We're particularly keen on hearing about development of other plugins that were inspired by looking at the source code for the plugins we've supplied.

Keeping the plugin of the month train rolling is alive in the lab.

First Plugin of the Month: Offset in XREF

Our first plugin of the month was written by our own Kean Walmsley. He first published it on his blog at:

Through the Interface

Mark Doel, from RMJM Hong Kong Ltd., provided the inspiration for this plugin and provided preliminary testing. The Offset in Xref plugin can be used with AutoCAD to enable the OFFSET command to work with externally referenced drawings. Once loaded, the standard OFFSET will work with external referenced content: instead of responding "Cannot offset that object.", the plugin will automatically copy the selected object into the current drawing, allowing it to participate with the OFFSET command.

You can get your hands on the plugin at:

Free Offset in XRef Plugin Download on Autodesk Labs site

Please let us know how it works out at labs.plugins@autodesk.com.

Getting this plugin party started is alive in the lab.

Through the Interface: Plugin of the Month

Our pal Kean Walmsley has a post on his blog:

Coming soon to Autodesk Labs... Plugin of the month

Check it out.

Expanding our nexus from tool users to tool developers is alive in the lab.