Other users were dismissing DS as the latest in a long train of ACAD clones, none of which have been as good as real ACAD. A little research into the Open Design Alliance and the IntelliCAD Technology Consortium would answer their questions - besides, I don't think that Dassault Systèmes would have put all that horsepower behind DraftSight if they didn't have all their ducks in a row, legally speaking. Some users were wondering about the legality of DS, considering that it's so close to ACAD in functionality and features. But if you know something about Diesel, give it a shot and let me know what you find out.īy the way, the official AutoCAD user forums contain a few discussions about DraftSight. It's been reported that Diesel macros work inside DS also. One of my first tasks will be to find out how to pass arguments to a script, and how to have a script open a custom pop-up window, to prompt the user for a needed value.Īpparently, there's also a tiny macro language, called Diesel, with which ACAD users can modify the Status line and do other little tweaks. Since I haven't had a lot of practice with ACAD scripts myself, I expect to be doing a lot of fumbling around for the next little while. (Also for use by command-line geeks who don't like dialog boxes. Remember that a lot of the commands that invoke a dialog box (like 'LAYER') have a command-line-only, alternative version that begins with a hyphen or dash (like '-LAYER'), for use in scripts. Almost all of what is written for ACAD applies to DS. Search the Web for 'Autocad script' or 'Autocad script tutorial'. If you want to learn how to write DS scripts, the best place to learn is learn from the materials available for ACAD.

That's generally the case with any script language vs. Generally, AutoCAD scripts (and hence DraftSight scripts, by association) have a bad reputation as a slow and clumsy alternative to LISP.

Autocad draftsight