Hello Donn:
dtrieloff wrote:How can I batch convert all of my old templete files to symbol files? I have had Datcad for a long time and have accumilated hundreds of templates. I want to now just use the symbol browser and reorginize my files.
I would hope that I would not have to open everyone of them and resave them, that would take like forever.
I have a peer to peer network and all templates and symbols are currently mapped to thier own drives.
Datacad 11.06
Two points (or so):
The main advantage of v11's Symbol Browser (SB hereafter) is that you can directly access the SM3 (old symbols) and DSF's (new symbols), and completely bypass the old TPL (template files). In fact, there is no new template file. The SB can open the symbol directories directly, or it can open the old templates -- but the template paths still have to work.
Though, it sounds like you have things set up so they
should work without changing anything. Are your templates on a T: drive and the symbols on an S: drive? And you have these drives mapped on each machine that it using them?
If so, you don't have to do a thing: you can either use the SB to open the templates and see all your symbols as you always have; or you can just open the symbols on the S: drive directly. The thing that you will lose is the
order of the symbols, but you will gain a much easier symbol saving process; as well as what the DSF files bring to the table, like layers and attributes.
Here's why I did: I left the T: and the S: drives intact. I
copied the new DataCAD 11 symbols to a new folder on the S: drive. I really like these new symbols because they have been renamed with "English" names, and they have been organized in a sensible way.
I then copied my custom symbols (that I
could access through the old templates) into the new v11 structure. I renamed the directories to understandable names (because you
can do this w/o messing anything up) and if neccessary, I have renamed the old SM3 files to get them in a proper order (or resaved as DSF). Unfortunately, renaming the symbol files is the
only thing you
cannot do in the SB -- just about everything else like moving, copying, renaming of folders is possible in the SB!
If we get a really easy WYSIWYG way to reorder the symbols in the SB, then we will have everything that I can think that we might need in the SB. And it is much easier to use than templates because you do not have to duplicate everything in the symbols and templates!
IHTH