Send your tweets straight from AutoCAD

Yes, if you are a power-tweeter you can now use your favorite web tool Twitter.com also directly in AutoCAD. The free twitter.vlx AutoLISP utility adds the TWITTER command to AutoCAD.

With the TWITTER command (or its LISP function) you can publish messages (tweets) to your Twitter account. You can either type your message or let AutoCAD sent an automated message on some event - lengthy script has completed, error condition has arised, a project component was updated, etc.

You may not see many practical applications of this Twitter interface but it illustrates a concept of other possible integrations between CAD and web.

See more information at the ACAD-Twitter description or follow us at Twitter.

Translate texts in AutoCAD drawings

With more and more companies working globally, many designers need to translate their drawings into other languages. Most of the typical texts in a CAD drawing are just simple words or short sentences. But some drawings - especially in the US - contain larger portions of texts (legends, descriptions, keynotes, legal...) which may need to be translated by other person than the CAD designer (legal aspects, business information...).

For such situations you can use our TRANS utility. This is a rather old tool developed originally for AutoCAD R14. TRANS contains a pair of commands - TR_WRITE and TR_READ. You can export all drawing texts to a simple text file, translate it, and read the texts back into their original positions. Many users are using TRANS in combination with TRADOS and other "translation memory" tools to assist and automate the translation.


Now you can also use a fully automatic translation. Thanks to the open API of the popular online translation tool Google Translate, it is possible to integrate Google Translate and AutoCAD. The new command in TRANS - gTRANS - just prompts for the translation language pair (e.g. English to German) and then performs an in-place translation of all selected texts (via Google Translate in the background).

You can download TRANS and get more information on the TRANS homepage. Integrating web services with AutoCAD add-on utilities opens many interesting options for drawing automation.