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In This Journal
Are Bad Standards Worth Having?
What are CAD Standards?
Sharing your Standards - How to provide your guidelines
ETransmit
- Part Three
On the Website
Tech Tip - Overkill
On the Blog
- 15 annoying clichés
Latest CAD News - link to our website
Latest Web Update
- CAD Leadership - Part 5
Take our
latest Survey - Tell us about your Civil office...
Standards -
We all have them (hopefully)
We all use them (hopefully)
We all need them (definitely)
But what shape are your standards in?
What
do they cover?
What is left out?
What are others saying
about your standards?
What version of software were they
developed for?
Have they been updated lately?
This month we take several perspectives on what
it is like to have Bad Standards, what Standards are, and
how to share your standard with others.
Mark W. Kiker, Editor
mark.kiker@caddmanager.com
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Are Bad Standards
Worth Having?
Many of us have very good standards in place and we go to great
lengths to enforce them. We review them on a regular basis
and update them as needed. Others have acceptable
standards that help to get people on the same page but leave a
few thing to the imagination (and CAD Users can be very
imaginative).
I want to speak to those of us that have a very weak standard.
One that has many holes in it. One that fails to define
the needed items that everyone uses every day. If you fall
into this category - listen up. If you have to use a
standard provided by others that falls into this category -
listen up.
We have all seen bad standards. Here are a few things that
I have seen that I think make for a Bad Standard.
Find out more...
What are CAD
Standards?
What should they cover?
Here is a brief list of the major topics that
should be covered by every CAD Standard.
There are 10 Essentials that I have culled together to assist in
getting the basics off on the right foot. You will also
see a fuller listing of some additional ideas for standardizing.
1. Standard Folders
2. Project Names
3. File Names
Read the rest of the list...
Sharing your
Standards - How to provide your guidelines
When others need to use your standard, what do you provide them
with?
I suggest the following...
Give them a hardcopy of your standard. Complete and
hopefully decently bound together (not three hole punched and
tied together with yarn, like in preschool). I would
suggest that you do not give them a three ring binder.
Pages could become lost or added by others. I would
suggest comb binding, so that the whole thing remains together.
Give them a PDF. This is efficient for sharing with large
groups and keeps you out of the printing business. With a
PDF file they should be able to print exactly as expected.
Give them your CTB or STB file(s). Don't make them
recreate this from scratch. I understand that they may
have to tweak the file a little based on the output device they
use. So the next item is also critical.
 Give
them a hardcopy plot of your pentable, directly printed at full
size and half size from your plotter. Make a file that has
255 lines and solid filled hatch patterned rectangles for your
shaded colors. By doing this they can see and match the
output that you are requesting.
If you want a copy of this Plotting DWG file - e-mail me and I
will send it to you.
More on the web...
ETransmit -
Part Three
Last month we continued the look at ETransmit and there is still
more to see...
Now we look at E-Transmitting Sheet Sets.
A very powerful
extension of the E-Transmit of single sheets.
More...
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