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So who remembers the symbol manager in Land Desktop? I used it pretty much every day, and really miss the functionality. I figured a roundabout way to include those symbols into a tool palette last March, and wrote about it here. It’s one method, and definitely not the best one. James suggested at the time that I put all the symbols and make one tool palette with Design Center. I didn’t like that idea, since that put all my symbols on one palette. I’d pretty much forgotten about it until today. I was looking for something and ended up finding something that brought it all back to me – follow the link to find out a MUCH easier way to replicate the symbol manager from LDT.

As I was browsing for a file to assist a customer, I found the following information in a folder:

I’m used to folders containing drawing files, but I noticed that the names of these files seemed a little familiar. After looking at them for a few minutes, I noticed that these seem to relate to the names of different areas of the symbol manager in Land Desktop. I took a look at a file or two, and noticed that each file contained a few blocks that correlated to the blocks found in those areas of the symbol manager. Hmmm…..why is this here, and what can I do with it?

The answer may astound you.

If I open Design Center and navigate to one of those drawings, I can right click on the drawing and create a tool palette from all the blocks in that drawing, as illustrated below:

If I go to each of those drawings, I can create individual tool palettes that come very close to imitating the selections that we had available in Land Desktop. What you end up with looks like the following:

Now, you may want to edit some of the settings in the tool palette so that the block behaves as you want it to. To edit the settings of any block, right click on it and select Properties. That will bring up the following dialog box:

Some things that you may want to set here involve the color, layer, and linetype of the block that you’re selecting. More importantly, you can specify the scale, and even set your block scale to be dependent on your drawing scale (or annotation scale – if you’re unaware, those two numbers are the same!) To do that, you must set your Auxiliary scale to dimscale (make sure that your drawing settings set the dimscale by checking the box shown below)

Note that the tool palette created will have the name of the drawing that it was created from – and these drawings are named appropriately for the symbol manager area that they’re intended to replicate.

Experiment with this, and see what you can accomplish with it. Good luck, and have fun!

(note:  I forgot to add the tool properties dialog screen grab last night – it’s there now.    Also, since the dialog box may be a bit fuzzy for your eyes, the location of those drawings is C:\Program Files\AutoCAD Civil 3D 2008\Data\Symbols)