Forcing an Empty Drawing

The Import GDSII module requires that the user start with an "empty" drawing. If the drawing is not empty then you will see an error message such as the one at right:

However, some users are unable to produce a truly empty drawing because start up scripts may create a new drawing with company defined layers and/or blocks.

What do you do in such a case?

  error message: must be an empty drawing


You can "fool" the SmartDie module by forcing it to think the drawing is empty, even when it really is not.

you do this with a simple AutoLisp command that redefines a variable -- this variable, dwgnew, is created by SmartDie and is set to true or false depending on various tests that SmartDie performs to determine if a drawing is new or not.

Prior to running SmartDie enter the following line on the AutoCAD command line

(defun dwgnew () t)

If you have done this correctly, the variable dwgnew is set to "t" (i.e. true) and the GDSII Import will then sucessfully run.

  setting the variable dwgnew to true