Tuesday, October 12, 2010

AutoCAD 2008 Scale list and copying & pasting issue

This is more of an AutoCAD 2008 scale list issue. In some of our Acad 2008 files, copying and pasting even a simple line took more than 10 minutes. The copy operation was quick. But the pasting operation went on and on. This is because of a bug in Acad2008 scale list, which the service pack 1 didnt fix. If you are on subscription and you are on AutoCAD 2009 or up, you are good!
There is a scalelist popup menu in autocad (typically) at the lower right corner. 
Pressing this menu button shows the scale lists used in the drawing. Typically the number of list are less and shows like this:
However, autocad 2008 tries to bring in scalelist from any xrefs / blocks imported from other drawings and over a period of time the number of scale list can reach 1000s and makes the dwg really slow. The worst offender is the paste command (because acad is looking for ways to bring in MORE scale lists!!!!) The screws up with Revit whenever such a DWG file is inserted into Revit.
The scale list of the corrupted file looks like this:



This image filled up the whole screen.
To remove all these scalelist, you can use the "-SCALELISTEDIT" command. Typing the comand without the "-" crashes AutoCAD. Using the "-" forces the command to use the command line. You can follow the command line prompts to 'reset' the scale list. You will have to keep doing this if the DWG files gets corrupted again.