I bought a $300 'auto-detail' plugin for my CAD software and it's been a headache.

It promised to clean up messy linework and fix layer issues with one click, but it just makes a bigger mess on complex drawings from other firms. I've wasted about 15 hours over the last month fixing the problems it creates instead of saving time. Anyone have a better method for cleaning up client files that doesn't involve magic buttons?

3 comments

3 Comments

samjohnson2mo ago

Ugh, I feel your pain so much! I tried a similar "fix-it-all" plugin last year and had the exact same problem. It would take a decent but messy file and turn it into pure chaos, adding random lines and merging layers that should never touch. I spent more time undoing its work than if I'd just cleaned the file by hand from the start. Those tools just can't handle the weird, custom stuff people bury in their drawings. Now I just bite the bullet and do the clean-up manually with basic tools. It's boring, but at least I know what it's doing.

adam_adams2mo ago

Maybe the plugin works fine and you just got a bad batch of files. Sometimes messy drawings are beyond what any tool can fix.

hannahk192mo ago

Yeah I read somewhere that a lot of these "one click" plugins are basically trained on clean, simple files so they totally break on real world messy drawings. Like, they have no idea how to handle someone who named layers "asdf" or drew everything in paper space with random colors. I've had way better luck just using a simple script that purges unused stuff and then manually going through with overkill and flatten. It's boring but at least I'm not screaming at my computer every time it merges my dimensions into the wrong layer.

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