Blocks are a good way to insert iconic elements in your drawing. It's a good way to make changes to your entire drawing, it also easy to quantify your drawing. With 'Quick Block Legend' you can create a legend based on these blocks and count them at the same time. Just run the command and pick a point in your drawing and in no time you will have a legend of your blocks. Even though a block represents an iconic element, it's doesn't mean they're all the same in you drawing. For starters the scale and rotation may be different from block to block. The contents of the block however can also have effect on how the block is represented in your drawing. If for instance a hatch in your block is colored 'ByBlock' that hatch will change color if you change the color of the block. Legends are added to guide the reader through a drawing. That means that any graphic difference potentially should get it's own entry in the legend. To decide what should go in the legend you can specify which properties the command has to consider. If the block contains entities which are for instance colored 'ByBlock' the command will takes those properties in consideration. The command will also consider the visibility state of your block if you added one. By default the command will use the block name for the legend entry. If you want you can use the description of the block instead. You can also choose to ignore orphaned blocks. 'Quick Block Legend' is not only useful to add a legend, it's also an easy way to count the blocks in your model space. If you like the command can even export that list to Excel.
Command summery
- Entry:
- QBL
- Applies to:
- blocks
- Effect:
- Create a legend with all blocks in the model space
- Tags:
- calculate, color, count, entry, inventory, layer, legend, linetype, lineweight, orphaned, rotation, scale
- Categories:
- Blocks, calculators, data is beautiful, excel, extractors, urban legends
- Suitability:
- No additional suitability information
- Watch on YouTube
Pointers
Development Log
September 2014
- The command doesn't stop if a textstyle has a fixed textheight anymore so you can use any textstyle you want.
- The height of a box will now adjust to the blocks in your drawing.
- Besides ignoring orphaned blocks you can also choose to ignore anonymous blocks
- An alignment option was added. Now you can choose if blocks are added based on their insertion point or the mid point.
Known issues