Bangalore, India
All .dwg CAD users know what system variables are. They are accessed using the SETVAR command and if you type SETVAR ?, you can see a long listing of these variables scroll by on your screen.
But, did you notice that, in Bricscad, you see another listing of slightly different looking variables at the end of the SETVAR ? dump. Try it today and discover something new!!
The initial scroll is full of variable names alphabetically arranged and all of them are in uppercase.
The last section is a list of variables that is in MixedCase. These are called Preference Variables and they are unique and specific to Bricscad only.
I did a listing of all Bricscad variables starting with A and B (using wildbard [ab]*) and this is what I got.
SETVAR
Variable name or ? <ddFastMode>: ?
Variable(s) to list <*>: [ab]*
ACADLSPASDOC 0
ACADPREFIX "f:\drabuilds_BC\STD\cui\ws\;f:\draClients\STD\appsupp;
ACADVER "18.0Bricscad" (Read Only)
ACISOUTVER 70
AFLAGS 0
ANGBASE 0.00
ANGDIR 0
ANNOALLVISIBLE 1
APBOX 0
APERTURE 10
AREA 0.00 (Read Only)
ATTDIA 0
ATTMODE 1
ATTREQ 1
AUDITCTL 0
AUNITS 0
AUPREC 4
AUTOMENULOAD 1
AUTOSNAP 63
AXISMODE 0
AXISUNIT X= 0.00 Y= 0.00 Z= 0.00
BACKZ 0.00 (Read Only)
BASEFILE "Default-m.dwt"
BINDTYPE 0
BKGCOLOR 256
BKGCOLORPS 7
BLIPMODE 0
AllowTabExternalMove 1
AllowTabMove 1
AllowTabSplit 1
AttractionDistance 3
AutoTrackingVecColor 171
AutosaveChecksOnlyFirstBitDBMOD 1
BlocksPath "C:\Users\Rakesh Rao\Documents\"
As you can see, the colored variables above in MixedCase are Preference Variables and Bricscad-only. The rest of standard system variables you can expect to find in other .dwg CAD software also.
The good thing about the Preference variables is that they add a great deal of power to the user and programmer wanting to control Bricscad. You can access and change them using SETVAR command. You can also access them in Lisp via the (getvar....) function.
The bad thing about them is that they are poorly documented. The only place where I could get some description about them was in Bricscad Release notes and by asking Bricsys support / forum users. You can also find some description of system variables and preference variables in Ralph Garbowski's e-Book (Bricscad V12 for AutoCAD Users ebook) , which you can download from here.
If you want some related reading, here is a good post by Jason Bourhill.
He shows a way to export the settings variables into a CSV file and also get some meaningful description of the Bricscad and general system variables.
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