DraftSight the Purge…

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In previous blogs, I’ve spoken about layers, linestyles, textstyles, blocks and so on. Over the course of a project, these can build up within your drawing and increase the file size substantially. Back when I first started in the CAD game, we didn’t have a server. USB hard drives were yet to be invented and DVD recorders were very expensive.We saved everything on to 3.5″ disks. Actually, we saved it twice, on to two separate disks! Obviously, these disks were very limited in capacity, so we had to make sure our drawings only contained the necessary information.

Today, space is less of an issue. because of this, many CAD users have got a little careless with their housekeeping.  Drawing files can be large and cumbersome and they contain unwanted / unneeded entities. The larger your drawing file, the more resources you need to use it.  If you don’t have the resources, then performance suffers.  So, what can you do about this? Let me introduce you to the Clean command.

The Clean command does exactly what the name suggests. It purges your drawing of entities that are defined or loaded in your drawing but are no longer required or used in your drawing. From the command line, type Clean and the Clean dialogue box will appear.

clean

Select Show unreferenced entities if it’s not already selected. You then have a couple of options:

  • Delete dependent entities (This removes items and subordinate items that are not referenced by other entities)
  • Confirm before delete (This displays the Confirm Clean dialog box for each item to remove.)

Once you’ve selected your options, click Delete All to run the command. Sometimes, just sometimes, you may need to run the command twice.

Try to get in the habit of not only purging your own drawings, but if a project team member sends you files, purge theirs too.  There is no point having your drawings nice and clean and tidy, then referencing in a drawing that contains a load of rubbish entities.

Discover more about DraftSight and how you can boost your productivity with DraftSight Professional, a powerful 2D design solution for professionals that includes productivity tools and an API.

www.DraftSight.com/Professional

MJ Smyth

MJ Smyth

The first time I used CAD, it was on a DOS PC with an 8088 processor, 640K of memory and a Hercules Mono Graphics Card... That, well that was a long long time ago. I switched to DraftSight the day it was released and haven't looked back!
MJ Smyth

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