Monday, February 25, 2013

Removing Educational version trace in AutoCAD

We had a problem with AutoCAD last week. One of the surveyors had sent us a drawing showing the change in site extents. This person didnt have a proper AutoCAD license and used an educational version. When we tried to insert this small site boundary change into our legal version of the DWG, we got a warning indicating that inserting that object will bring in:

  1. Educational version banner all around the sheet for all prints. 
  2. While opening our file, AutoCAD will warn that we are opening a file created by an educational version.
  3. Any other file that references our file will also carry this educational version tag!!!
I think, AutoCAD may want to rethink this system. Because of somebody else's problem, we had an issue to be resolved. We could force the surveyor to use the legal version (which we did) however, the amount of time lost in asking the surveyor to send the DWG again from a legal version of the software was a week. 
Alternatively, one could "save as" the file created using educational version in the legal version as DXF file and then open it back in AutoCAD, the warning and the tag go away.