Intelligent P&ID's extracted to regular AutoCAD DWG's

[HybridAWD]

Is there any "fast" way to take my intelligent P&Id's and create them as regular P&Id's to send out for them to be viewed?

For some reason the people they are being sent to want them in DWG format rather than PDF. It's odd since they have no reason to edit my files anyhow, and I definitely don't want to package my project and send everything for them to mess with.

Any ideas? A fellow co-worker said to just copy the dwg's from the project folder onto my local hard drive, but I dont feel that comfortable doing that.

[dave]

print to PDF's, or you could take the time and make the DWF's - Clients should never get DWG's in my opinion.

[Aplant Monkey]

I have made copies of dozens of .DWG's into my hard drive in the past. The important thing to remember is to have NO AutoPlant applications running at all. Not even Data Manager or Vision, absolutley nothing (did I make that clear...?) If you forget what will happen is that you will re-path the drawings onto your C: drive and the other people on the project will no longer have access to it. It is not the end of the world if this happens just a pain in the butt.

[PlantWorker]

HybridAWD,

that's a standard function ..
look in p&id-tools, Import/export, create export copy, it creates a copy of the drawing as a dwg with all attributes, but without the xdata and the nodes

you can also start it by typing ExportCopy on the command line.

[Aplant Monkey]

I just make a simple copy through Windows Explorer

[PlantWorker]

Aplant Monkey

you can copy as much drawings as you want. MS Explorer has NO influence on the database or original drawing.

You can only have problems if you open the copied drawing with AutoPLANT P&ID, which will happen if you double click the dwg after working in autoplant because acad will re-use the aplant profile. Because the software finds the project-id and doc_id in the drawing, it will link to the database.

solution is to start autocad with an autocad-only profile (add /p acad or so to the startup, the acad profile must not have the plant 2004\support and support_2d support file search paths !!!!).If you launch your acad once, you may doubleclick the following dwg's, because the acad profile stays active. If you open the copied drawing with plain autocad, nothing will happen to your project. In WinNT4 I knew also how to add the /p acad to the double click-on-dwg command, but I havn't found it in XP

The export copy is of course the better way (but it's a recent addition)

[dave]

what we do to set our normal autocad profile:

right click your autocad icon / properties /

In the target box:

"C:\Program Files\AutoCAD 2005\acad.exe" -p yourProfileNameHere"

[Aplant Monkey]

That is exactly what we do as well Dave. And even if you use the different profile we have experienced the occassion where Aplant will re-path the drawing if ANY application is running in the background. My opinion is better to be safe than sorry. close all applications then you won't risk your files.

[HybridAWD]

Yeah i knew about the Create Export copy, but for 55 P&ID's, it would be too time consuming. thanks for all the input everyone.

[Sprinklermania]

Howdy y'all.
Came accross your forum here while trying to get some information on this AutoPlant program. A sprinkler contractor that I am trying to sub the design from has a project that is being co-ordinated in Autoplant. I currently design my systems with AutosprinkVR (3D based cutomized for sprinkler design), which is not an AutoCAD based program but can produce dwg export files. I was wondering, on your projets with Autoplant, what your sprinkler contractor works with? (file type etc,) and how the interaction of files takes place.
Thank you very much for any input.
P.S. I have no experience with Autoplant so please keep it simple for me :)

[dave]

Welcome to our little world Sprinklermania. To be honest I have no idea what my sprinkler guys use to design. They were already installed when I moved in. Interesting post though. Good luck