progeCAD support, tips and troubleshooting forum. progeCAD works very similar to some versions of AutoCAD. Moderated.

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#424 by builder2005
Sat Jan 31, 2009 8:19 am
Hi,
Is it possible to print out the drawing with always current date in the footer without setting it manually in the printing option?
It is a litte bit irritating if you have to set current date before make a printing.

greetings from Poland :)
#427 by caddit
Tue Feb 03, 2009 2:31 am
Hi,


unfortunately there is no way "out-of-the-box" to do this becasue progeCAD doesn't yet support RTEXT and FIELD (but it does support DIESEL).

Thank you for adding your opinion to this - many loud voices encourage new features ;)

If you have system development skills you might be able to swing something with OLE embedding from an Excel field but I haven't tried it.
#429 by iCADsales.com
Wed Feb 04, 2009 1:11 am
builder2005 wrote:Hi,
Is it possible to print out the drawing with always current date in the footer without setting it manually in the printing option?
It is a litte bit irritating if you have to set current date before make a printing.

greetings from Poland :)


Roll out onto the Internet, say on Google, and do a search for "time-date stamp autolisp". I'll bet there will be quite a few different routines as this is a very often requested need. Make sure whichever routine you select is not Visual LISP, but good ole straightforward no raz ma taz standard AutoLISP.

Set this up to run each time you save your drawing, issue the plot command, or, open or exit a drawing. Look into "undefine" for more information on how to redefining commands.

Enjoy!
#432 by builder2005
Thu Feb 05, 2009 7:19 am
Roll out onto the Internet, say on Google, and do a search for "time-date stamp autolisp". I'll bet there will be quite a few different routines as this is a very often requested need. Make sure whichever routine you select is not Visual LISP, but good ole straightforward no raz ma taz standard AutoLISP.

Set this up to run each time you save your drawing, issue the plot command, or, open or exit a drawing. Look into "undefine" for more information on how to redefining commands.

Enjoy![/quote]

Can you explain how to implement this? I downloaded autolips stamp but no idea what's next step.

regards
#433 by iCADsales.com
Thu Feb 05, 2009 9:21 am
to redefine the print command so that it will run your routine before it prints the drawing each and every time, you must undefine the command "print".

If you are not familiar with AutoLISP you can still do this, just be careful what you change and make a backup.

We will be editing the icad.lsp file which is usually found right in the root folder of progeCAD. not the progeSOFT folder but the progeCAD folder. If the file does not exist in that folder it just means that no applications that run on progeCAD, such as progeEARTH or progeCAM, have been installed. Open the file using notepad which can be found in your start menu of Windows. Again, if the file does not exist you can simply do a save within notepad, navigate the folder mentioned above, and save the file as icad.lsp.

There are other things you could do to pretty up the loading of the icad.lsp, the handling of errors, etc but for the purposes of this exercise we are just going to do the work required to get the job done.


Once the file is in the editor we need to disable the standard print command. so, on a line by itself at the bottom of the file in case there are other lines before it, put in a statement that looks like this (command "undefine" "print") Now it is very important with all programming languages that you get the "syntax" right. The quotation marks and the parentheses are as important as the words you type.

Now, we need to define a new print command. The routine you downloaded, it has a name of the file, the location where the file exists on the hard drive (to make things simply, copy the file into the progeCAD folder) and a name of the command you run to make it work in progeCAD. Make sure you have those available before you start this exercise.

Lets say the file is called "plotstamp.lsp" and the command to run it is "plotstamp". Here is the rest of the code to put into your icad.lsp file:

(load "plotstamp.lsp")

(c:print ( / )
(c:plotstamp)
(command ".print")
)

The command print was undefined and did not exist in the commands available to be run inside progeCAD, BUT, if you put a period in front before the command name progeCAD will treat it like a normal command.

That should be it. everytime you run progeCAD the icad.lsp file loads up, undefines the print command, and redefines it so when you type print at the command line or select from a menu it first runs the plotstamp routine and then runs the print command.

You enjoy now ya hear! :wink: