Areas

In AutoCad 2008 it seems they still haven't resolved the issue of displaying the area of objects on the drawing - a floorplan with columns, say. I still use an old custom routine for this but it seems by now someone would have thought of a way of combining this functionality within something like the HATCH command, such that any amendments to the hatch boundary would have a corresponding impact on the displayed value - or am I missing something?

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I should add that the fact that listing a hatch object gives you its area in units² suggests that the capability is already there, just not implemented.

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As Autodesk bought REVIT a couple of years ago, why can't they take some of it's good points and put them in AutoCAD? I refer to the room tags which give area information. I know you would need to designate lines as room bounding same as REVIT does for walls but they have the code so how dificult is it to copy it over?
I do a lot of space areas for retail design and this would be ideal. At present I draw a polyline on a specific layer (area outlines) then look at it's properties. When I change the shape of the space I adjust the polyline but it would be good if it was more automatic.
John

Ranger a écrit :
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Hello,
You can give a look here : http://www.delicad.com/autocad/activeline_pro.php
It is in french, but I can translate it if anyone is interested.
Philippe

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Actually, there's a link there to an english translation. Yes, this is a good utility - but I really think that something like this should be just built in to AutoCad 'out-of-the-box'. Bizarrely, we use both square feet and square metres in the UK, so it would be useful if the 'out-of-the-box' utility also included the ability to display the area in a variety of ways simultaneously. Another 'feature' would the ability to declare a slightly smaller area than was actually measured - equivalent to the scale factor option of associative dimensions.
As I mentioned, I have a lisp routine that does all this but it's a little dissatisfying as it's not easily portable, i.e. you can't send your drawing to someone else and expect that because they're using the same version of the software, they'll be able to figure out how to implement the routine.
I have a some similar ideas about AutoCad's handling of revision clouds, xrefs and drawing issues - but I guess that's for another day...

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They did, it's called AutoCAD Architecture. It has the room/area capability you are talking about. AutoCAD is the base they build the vertical products on.

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Good to know. I'll check it out... but I still wish it was a feature of the vanilla edition.