By Dennis Collin
Now available for AutoCAD 2016!
An essential 'App' for any AutoCAD, Revit or Vault user! This 'Super Purge' command extends the functionality of the basic Purge command, several fold!
This very impressive looking facility has been recently updated this month (June 2015) to support the latest AutoCAD 2016 version and vertical companion products.
Frequently in the office you will be provided poorly maintained AutoCAD drawings, with legacy attachments and references from Microstation, with unused Block Definitions, Text Styles, layers and linetypes etc. You need these drawings to reference or edit but for a multitude of reasons the file is slow to handle or is of an excessive file size. Another issue is, that it's not an isolated file but rather there are many folders containing several hundred of these problematic, bloated files. Whether the drawings are created from Autodesk products or competitive products these files need to be sorted and this can be a major issue if you are primarily a Revit User or you are needing to add many drawings to your Vault Setup. Having some kind of utility is useful when you need to get on with your main task which is often not having to clean up other people's drawings and having no time to do it!
AutoCAD has had its own 'Purge' command now for many years (it originally being introduced back in R12 DOS!) However apart from setting up a script using ScriptPro or similar its been a problematic task to deal with hundreds of files with lots of different issues.
DWG Purge has been available for AutoCAD for some time being released in 2013 currently at version 4 it is available to download for subscription customers of the Autodesk Exchange Site.
Installation is simple and you'll find the improved Purge options in the Add-ins tab (shown in image)
There are 2 commands for this plug-in
- DWG-PURGE
Which is for purging your Current Drawing file
By entering DWG-PURGE at the command line this plug-in, in addition to all the standard clean-up options to unused AutoCAD elements (Layers etc..) the command will remove all DGN unreferenced LineTypes, and annotation scales.
If Xrefs are present, a dialog box will appear asking if you want to purge and clean up all the attached Xref files too.
A status message will appear advising on what has been cleaned.
- DWG-PURGE-BATCH
This is useful for purging multiple drawings without having to open the DWG files.
In DWG-PURGE-BATCH you can add the drawings to the file list by using the following methods
- By picking the drawing from 'Select drawing' icon
- By picking a folder
- Drag and drop
In this dialog box you have a range of the following options
- Purge the drawings and save to a different location
- Purge the drawings and add a suffix to the file name e.g.:- “Mydrawing_purged.dwg “
- Purge and save the drawing to an another version
These options are all very useful to the occasional AutoCAD user or a Vault Admin who doesn't want to get bogged down with tedious and lengthy file maintenance tasks.
Also feature useful for Revit users who suffer slow performance when referencing in multiple DWG files to their Revit Project. Although files should be left in a tidy state they are frequently are not and of course results in 'knock on issues' for people down the line.
Whilst the native Purge command has also been improved the "Dwg Purge" utility has some useful extra features that make it an invaluable addition to any CAD/BIM/Vault Administrator/Implementer/User who is faced with a load of 'problematic' AutoCAD files.
More info on this plug-in can be obtained here: