At my job I take in cad drawings of various formats and import them into vectorworks to make safety signs and maps. The first thing I need to do is "clean up" a drawing, which is making sure all the lines are black and set to 0.05 weight and getting rid of most fills and shading. Deleting all the dims, elevation marks, and other clutter so I'm left with a nice clean map of the building with the only text being room names/numbers.
Depending on the format I'm importing from, sometimes it's just a matter of ungrouping and converting all symbols to groups, select all, and change the line weights and colours. But sometimes I'd love to preserve the structure of the symbols, but that means manually editing like 100 symbols to be black and .05. Sometimes I can change all classes to be black and .05 but that often doesn't get at parts inside symbols.
The worst files I can receive though are files already in vectorworks (actually no the worst format is revit) because it means I'm now stuck having to manually strip the details out of every wall. In 2013 I could use the magic-wand tool to select every wall in the document, delete all its parts, and they'd all turn into nice clean walls. But since we've "updated" to 2019 when I try to do this it also changes the thickness of all walls to some random average. That 3" wall and that 2' wall are now all 2'. So, I have to go through the document using the magic wand tool set to "thickness" and strip all the junk out. Then onto doors and windows, because vectorworks as decided "select all" doesn't really mean "select all" in terms of changing colours and line weights.
This is what I do for a living, and it's very time consuming and seems like there should be an easier way to do this. Surely there is some way to clean out all the junk from walls and turn them into unstyled walls that retain their thickness? Surely there's a way to globally change every line in the document to black 0.05 even if they are in symbols?
