I've had a run in with the menu unload and menu load calls from a lisp routine and Adobe PDF Maker. Turns out that if you have a self-rebuilding menu system in place in ACAD for when the lesser computer savvy folks loose their pull downs and they rebuild on starting ACAD that this doesn't play nicely with the way the Adobe has their menu and tool bars loading. After numerous hours and being bumped from one customer service agent to tech to currently waiting to hear back from a programmer I was able to isolate it out and found this out. I'm sure there are plenty of folks who use PDF Distiller, etc. in ACAD and may not even know there are supposed to be tool bars and pull down menus that go with it. I didn't till I was scanning the website and noticed that. You can (if you can find where the PDF tool bar and menu are stuck) move them out of where ever they turned up (ours was in the 6th of 8 menus as we have lots of 3rd party things loading) and I was able to physically move the code from that mns file into the ACAD mns file.

This worked fine for the pull down but the button was much easier. Upon looking at the code there are simply a couple of commands; PDF, PDFMAIL, and a couple of others which the techs at Adobe swear can't be used at the command prompt and should you try that they wouldn't be the same - I've tried them and they are the same. We've been able to duplicate this on several machines. Adobe doesn't want to take a stand on it and prefers to shuffle me around from one tech to another none of whom know what's going on.

If nothing else I give them extra points for finding the most annoying route to put a menu into ACAD that I have ever seen - a registry entry that at ACAD startup puts the code in a random mns file from an encrypted arx file in an adobe sub folder for A2k4 - A2k5 isn't supported and half their techs don't know that they support A2k4 even but supposedly according to them they do support 2003.... must have missed that one!

I've forwarded Jon's comments on to my friends at Adobe...if they come back with anything informative, I'll share it in a future issue.

This update corrects a problem that sometimes prevents the spelling checker from finding misspelled words in multiline text (mtext).

This problem occurs when you select mtext and dtext objects before running the SPELL command. It may also occur if you resize the text bounding box or have more than one type of text object in your drawing. All types of mtext are affected, including leaders.

Jeffery P Sanders Free AutoLisp Routines

Free tutorials for AutoCAD2005 - plus on-line quizzes

XLQuest provides exams for architects and mechanical engineers who use AutoCAD. You can tailor your tests if you are an instructor or an employer. Download a free sample of the test to try before you buy.

To make it more interesting, many of the drawings had xrefs that were unloaded - so they were part of the drawing, but not visible. He wanted these drawings to be detached as part of the lisp routine.

You can download a copy of the lisp routine here . The routine basically searches through a drawing and locates all the xrefs. If the xref is loaded, it binds it (converts it to a block). If the xref is unloaded, the xref is detached. The drawing is then purged, zoom all, and then saved. As always, I have kept the code open and commented so lispers can use it as a jumping-off point for their own code.

To run it as part of a batch file, I recommend Scripteeze. You can download a free trial copy that will allow you to process 20 drawings at a time. There are also a bunch of free lisp routines and utilities on the site, so it is worth a quick peek.