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Subject: 
MLCad Parts Tree (was: LDD vs LDraw)
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.cad
Date: 
Wed, 13 Dec 2006 18:11:20 GMT
Viewed: 
1988 times
  
In lugnet.cad, Chris Phillips wrote:
I don't doubt that there's a way to do it, but it isn't obvious to the casual
user, and the default organizational tree is not as well organized as LDD.
(In all fairness, LDD is dealing with a pre-defined, limited subset of parts,
but still...)  I think if there was an easy way to define a "virtual parts
bin" and share these with others as a separate file, it would be a very
useful feature. Depending on what I'm trying to design on any given day, it
would be nice to just select a parts palette with a certain organization and
start building.  It shouldn't be necessary to completely re-configure the
entire CAD program just to do this kind of thing for each project.

That's a cool idea.

In the meantime, if you look in the MLCad program directory, there's a file
called MLCad.grp.  This contains all the grouping information for the parts
tree.

The organization of the file is pretty straightforward.  In my copy of the file,
the first two lines are '0' and '21'.  I don't know what the 0 is, but I'm
guessing 21 is the number of defined part groups.  After the first two lines,
each pair of lines define a group title and a pattern.  The syntax for the
patterns is fairly simple.

A pattern which is simply a piece of text matches all part titles containing
that text.

Adding < to the beginning of the text limits it to matching the front of titles.

Add > to the end, and it only matches the end of titles.

You can use ! in front of the pattern to exclude matching titles.

Combine multiple patterns with boolean operators & (for and) and | (for or).

I think you must use spaces around &, |, and !, and cannot use spaces inside <
and >.

As an example, one of the entries in my setup is for undecorated bricks:

Brick (plain)
<Brick & ! Pattern>

A utility to maintain several MLCad.grp files would be very cool.

HTH,
Steve Bliss



Message has 1 Reply:
  Re: MLCad Parts Tree (was: LDD vs LDraw)
 
(...) That is very helpful! Thanks! (18 years ago, 13-Dec-06, to lugnet.cad)

Message is in Reply To:
  Re: LDD vs LDraw
 
(...) That doesn't surprise me; most of what I know about MLcad was learned by trial-and-error. (...) I must be doing something wrong, but whenever I place a new part it seems to appear in an arbitrary location in one plane, and doesn't "snap" to an (...) (18 years ago, 13-Dec-06, to lugnet.cad, FTX)

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