AutoCAD Tip – Useful routine to transfer styles and settings from other AutoCAD drawings

By Dennis Collin

A common question I get from many users is “How can I transfer settings like Layers and Blocks from other drawing files, without using a function like copy and paste?”

This can be easily achieved with the AutoCAD Designcentre. This environment was introduced way back in AutoCAD 2000 and allows users to browse to a DWG drawing and drag and drop styles and settings from that file into their current drawing.

Support settings includes Blocks, Detailviewstyles, dimstyles, layers, layouts, linetypes, multileader styles, sectionview styles, tablestyles, textstyles, visualstyles and Xrefs.

They can be located from the preview pane on the right-hand side and then dragged and dropped into the working file.

Whilst useful there are some settings that Designcentre cannot import, including bespoke coordinate systems (UCS) Groups and Layer States. However, there is a substantial AutoCAD developer network who have written some routines that will allow the import of a wider range of styles including UCS.

Such a routine is on the App Store, jokingly called ‘Steal’ from another drawing. However, joking aside utilising a standards drawing for such things like blocks (symbols) and layers to import agreed predefined settings is good practice and is referred to more professionally as, following CAD standards!

Upon running the program with the command syntax 'Steal' at the AutoCAD command-line, the user is prompted to select a drawing file (dwg/dwt/dws) from which to steal items. Following a valid selection, if the selected drawing contains items not already present in the current drawing, a dialog will appear displaying items available for import.

The user may choose to import a range of options like what can be transferred by the Designcentre, but will also include additional settings like UCS (if a bespoke setting exists within that drawing).

The application supports the following definitions:

• Blocks
• Layers
• Linetypes
• Dimension Styles
• Text Styles
• Table Styles
• Multileader Styles
• Multiline Styles
• Layouts
• Page Setups
• User Coordinate Systems
• Named Groups
• Views
• Layer States
• Scales
• Materials
• Drawing Properties
• Custom Properties

The above definitions are listed in the left-hand list panel of the dialog, with elements within each definition listed on the right. To import the styles simply select the desired settings and choose import.

It is possible to import multiple items from several definitions as the dialog will persist until either the user exits the command, or there is nothing left to import from the selected drawing.

Should the reference drawing change the user can update the data displayed in the dialog by pressing the Refresh button. A data refresh may be required after importing items such as blocks since these items may have object dependencies (such as layers, linetypes and other block definitions dependent upon the constituent objects of the imported block) which are also be imported to the active drawing.

The user may also search the collections for a specific item to import using the search panel to the bottom of the dialog. The search is not case-sensitive and may use wildcards.

In summary this App is a great addition to compliment the out of the box Designcentre functionality.

The Steal from Drawing Tool is a free add-in and is available for all current AutoCAD versions (2018-2022) and can be downloaded from the App store here:

https://apps.autodesk.com/ACD/en/Detail/Index?id=4083540461254954651&appLang=en&os=Win32_64

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