W-BLOCK verses PURGING

by Anonymous
(Reston, Virginia, U.S.A.)

Q. A drawing has 2000, 3000, or more bytes.

You've purged it all you can and it still has over a 1000.

I w-block it to make it smaller.

What effect, if any, does this have on the drawing?

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Mar 11, 2011
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starstarstarstarstar 		Wblock Enema
by: Jim

Your question sounds like something a teacher would ask for an assignment ;)

I like to think of the WBLOCK command as AutoCAD's way of giving your drawing an enema. I know, gross analogy but I think you get the point.

It cleans out all the little bitty left overs that the PURGE command may not have gotten rid of.

I guess the same can be said about the EXPORT command as well.

Now, I don't know how much of a difference it makes if you WBLOCK everything (i.e. *) but if you block out SELECTED entities, AutoCAD only brings those entities into the new file.

Where as performing a [*] at the command prompt does not totally clean it out.

I do use PURGE a lot though, but my drawings don't get big enough where I need make the file really small.

I PURGE mostly unused layers, DIM styles, text styles, etc.

But if I get a really large file and I only need to work with certain areas of the drawing, I will WBLOCK it to a new drawing or EXPORT the info.

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