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18 February 2016

Updated 16 November 2021

CAD Standards Compliance Headaches?

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One of the biggest headaches in getting CAD standards compliance is finding a fast and pain-free way to verify CAD standards are being followed. You find yourself with hundreds of files and you have to manually go through each one, ensuring they all follow the required standards. You spend hours upon hours, clicking, dragging and changing each file until they all follow the compliance rules. But wait! You suddenly realize that half-way through, you missed a simple departure — and now you have to comb through each file yet again, hoping that you didn’t miss this error in more than one file.

Besides the time and the painstaking effort it takes to verify CAD standards compliance, the worst part is that your energies and talents are being wasted on a menial task.

The answer to this problem is simple and effortless: RuleManager™ and SpecChecker™.

With RuleManager, a tool included for free with every copy of SpecChecker, you can create a very effective set of CAD standard rules in minutes from either existing files that you know meet the standard or from one or more DGN libraries that are supplied for most MicroStation® V8, V8i or CONNECT projects where CAD standards must be followed.

SpecChecker uses the rules you create with RuleManager to make sure your design files meet your CAD standards. The rules are stored in text files, which are easy to edit and change whenever the standards change.

Using SpecChecker is Fast and Easy

You can interactively check a single file you are actively working on, by using SpecChecker to zoom in on each non-standard element and correct the off-standard element by using any MicroStation tool or the optional corrections defined in your SpecChecker rules.

If your job is to ensure that a submitted batch of drawings follow CAD standards, using SpecChecker you would be able to generate a comprehensive report for all the files in a batch process. You could then have the contractor or drafter correct their own mistakes, using SpecChecker in interactive mode.

Generating a report is also useful if you are the CAD manager. You would probably want to spot-check groups of project files to ensure your team is following the CAD standards as they create each new component of the project. Then you could have the errors automatically corrected using SpecChecker, or you could send the errant files back to the design team and make them do the correction.

Fast Pain Relief for Last Minute Changes

SpecChecker is best known for its ability to perform CAD standard checks on MicroStation files based on “rules” that define your specific CAD standard. Another aspect of SpecChecker, that not everyone knows about, is that SpecChecker can also be used to make many types of changes in your design files that, if left unhandled, would later cause headaches when a project is due.

For example you could change the text font from “Working” to “Arial” in as many of your files as you like. Add this to SpecChecker’s ability to run in a batch process on tens or hundreds or thousands of files, and you have a powerful solution for making required changes at any point in the project’s development.

For more information on SpecChecker and RuleManager or to schedule a free, on-line demonstration, contact an Axiom MicroStation Consultant today! Call 727-442-7774 or visit www.AxiomInt.com.