Recreating Problem Drawings
In this blog series, we will be covering a method that I regularly use to recreate problem drawings that crash too often, or even corrupted to the point that it will no longer open. If you have experienced these types of drawings and are looking for a potential solution, read on!
In Part 1 of this blog series, we covered the topic of cleaning up our drawing in preparation to recover our problem drawing. Purging and auditing your drawings on a regular basis will help keep your drawings from exhibiting the issue we are trying to correct in this series.
In Part 2 of this blog series, we covered the topic of the Layer States Manager, a tool we use to save the current state of our layer properties to be called upon later.
After attempting to clean our problem drawing with the PURGE and AUDIT commands, then saving our layer states, we can now move on to the most important step of the drawing recovery process; drawing insertion.
If you were unable to complete Parts 1 and 2 of this blog series due to an extraordinarily corrupt drawing, please continue with this part of the blog series. While purging, auditing, and saving layer states help ensure a duplicate drawing with minimal effort, this steps not necessarily mandatory but highly recommended if you are capable of opening the corrupt drawing.
To begin the drawing insertion process, we first need to start a new drawing based on the template used originally to create the drawing exhibiting unwanted behavior. Once a new drawing has been started, we need to set the coordinate system based on the original drawing and save it to a directory, preferably within the same directory as the original. Use a temporary name for now. Once we recreate the drawing and determine that all information and objects present and displayed properly, we can clean up the directly by archiving the original problem drawing, then renaming the newly created drawing to the original name.
With a newly created empty drawing open, set to the proper coordinate system, and saved in location, use the INSERT command to open the Blocks palette.
If you are not already set to Model Space, do so now.
On the Blocks palette, navigate to the Current Drawing tab, ensure that all options at the bottom are unchecked. Ensure that the insertion point values are set to 0, scale values are set to 1, Rotation angle value is set to 0. This will ensure that the problem drawing is inserted into the same location as the original drawing.
Click on the drawing insertion button found on the top of the Blocks palette, just to the right of the filter. Using the dialog that appears, browse to the drawing to recover, and press open.
If coordinate systems were set, you may be presented with a dialog asking you to use geographic data or prompt for insertion point. Choose “Prompt for insertion point”, which will use the values we set previously in the Block palette Options section.
After processing, you should now see the contents of the original drawings model space here in our new drawing. At this point it is a good idea to save, this was the most critical step.
If the drawing failed to insert, refer to Part 1 of this blog series and attempt to recover the original drawing and try again.
Inserting the problem drawing into our newly created drawing brings all the content in as an unnamed block. Select any newly inserted object to select the entirety of the unnamed block, then use the EXPLODE command to break the block down into the individual objects.
After exploding the inserted block, we are essentially left with a file bloated with not only the individual objects, but we also have a definition for the now exploded unnamed block. To remove the bloat from our file, we will use the PURGE command that we used in Part 1 of this blog series to do so.
Finally, we will AUDIT our newly created drawing to remove any additional issues with the file using the techniques in Part 1 of this blog series.
At this point, we are left with a newly created drawing with all the Model Space objects of the original but no layout or Paper Space elements.
Hopefully, you should be able to open this newly created drawing with far less issues and frustrations than its original counterpart.
Check out Part 4 of this blog series, where we complete our drawing recover process of recreating layouts from the original drawing to the newly recovered drawing!
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