“In my time working as a CAD Technician, I have been tasked with several projects that required “cleaning up” drawing. One project in particular where PET was a pivotal tool to my ability to be productive was a pipeline project where construction easements were generated along the alignment and exhibit were created for each parcel where the proposed pipeline was to be crossing. These exhibits were generated in Carlson by a third party and were not up to my company‘s CAD standards. This task involved editing bearing and distance text, ownership and parcel identification text, etc. Depending on parcel size and complexity, I needed to edit anywhere from a dozen text objects, to 200 text objects. PET‘s Text Search & Replace (TSR) & Entity Search & Replace (ESR), were the best & only tools for the job.
TSR allowed me to create routines that would manipulate/modify all text objects in several ways at once. This ranged from selecting specific text objects, changing their layers, styles, the text itself, and their sizes (different sizes for different text types).
ESR works very similarly except it works with primitive objects – lines, polyline, arcs, etc. I used ESR to manipulate parcel line work in a similar way as I needed to manipulate the text objects – layer, linetype, etc. to meet my companies CAD standards.
The icing on the cake is PET‘s ability to group these functions together using MapTools Commander so that several operations can be executed at once, seamlessly, precisely & flawlessly. The golden ticket with PET‘s ability to automate these types of tasks is that 15 minutes of creating PET commands can and will save you countless hours and it will work correctly every time, automatically. With a little effort to create these routines and group them together, I ended up being able to open an exhibit drawing, choose my newly created custom command and modify all the text objects and linework to my satisfaction, save and close the drawing in less than 15 seconds no matter the size or complexity of the parcel.
Side note: I was scolded by my manager because I was producing upwards of 10 times what the other CAD Technicians were producing. Moral of the story, PET can increase productivity exponentially. I would recommend this product to any CAD Tech or anyone that uses AutoCAD, period.”
Daniel O. Inloes, LSIT
Survey Technician
Certified UAS Pilot
LW Survey