Mass DWG Save-As Back To An Older Release

This question came up during a support call. Thinking this had to be a common request I immediately started looking for a LISP of some type. The caller mentioned the Autodesk site said something about DWG True View doing this. I would have never thought of turning to a viewer for a mass converter.

However here it is...

Drawings can be added from several folders at once and then saved in place or to a predefined folder.

Select the version to save back to and press Convert

There are several predefined conversions setup but you can create your own as well. Here are the options for setting up a custom conversion style.

Using the Wire Gap Feature In Place Of From/To Arrows

Today I ran across an interesting use abuse of the Wire Gap feature.

AutoCAD Electrical supports "gaps" in crossing wires. The way this works is that each side of the broken wire has an Xdata (Extended entity data) pointer that points at the handle of the other side. AutoCAD Electrical treats it as a continuous unbroken wire even though it is in two pieces.

So knowing this, you could set the Wire Cross Style to Gap and then break the wires into two pieces solely for the propose of manually moving the one half somewhere else on the same sheet. Wire numbers and wire reports would continue to function correctly.  

Since this is a good bit of work we can simply use the Check/Repair Gap Pointers and choose two wires that are already in position. This accomplishes the same task but is much quicker.