Best Practices working with .dwg data – White Paper

Rakesh Rao

Dear BricsCAD Users,

I have written a technical document, a white paper (PDF attached) about summarizing my experiences working with BricsCAD and AutoCAD users across the world in the last 25 years.

This white paper tells you what wrong you could be doing and how you can get the most out of your .dwg CAD platform and aims to elevate the user to better and higher levels of productivity.

Best Practices working with .dwg data – White Paper

We use this white paper as the basis for workshops we run to help users understand some of the advanced features of .dwg in BricsCAD and deliver a value-add that goes just beyond just saying it is an alternative, value-for-money CAD platform.

By no means is my writing complete, error-free or the final word. I request fellow users to contribute and add, suggest changes to help make the document better.

Please feel free to use this content in your BricsCAD sales and support, in whatever way it may help you.

Best Regards
Rakesh Rao
Smarter .dwg CAD

Joe Dunfee

 The company I work for had actually lost a bid for a project, when we could not get the price down to the customer's budget. He went to a competitor who faithfully stuck to the customer's budget.  However, he is now back with my company, who is being paid to fix all the problems created by our competitor.  

My personal challenge was dealing with the competetor's DWG.  All blocks were exploded, including even some hatches. There were no polylines for anything. A mix of color by entity, and layers. Line weight was by color, but of course, no pen style file was included. Rather than put the different trades over top of the same drawing of the building, he chose to make a copy of the main structure.  Of course, over time those copies were not maintained as changes were made. Color choices were optimized for a black background, so color printing onto white paper was not an option. When I purged the file, the results were 1/10 of the original size.  

I am sure the draftsman was frustrated with the DWG as well.  His approach to creating DWGs surely made his own work as frustrating as it was for me to deal with it.  

I would expect that there is going to be a lawsuit by the company to try to recoup some of the money for the design flaws.  So, I had to consider how to defend all the work I put into the revisions to the drawings and fixing the problems.  In the end, I tried to be gentle with my criticism and tried to add some disclaimers defending him. since I do not know his situation.

Sometimes employees are asked to do things with an impossible deadline, or incomplete information.  They may never have been trained properly, and never given the time to learn anything more about the CAD software.   And of course, his final purpose is to create drawings on paper for a permit. So, unless there are changes, his approach to the drawing is not too extremely bad.  Though, changes would be very time consuming to do.

-Joe