RocketCad 15 Installation Instructions. This is the version for use with AutoCAD 2000i. 1. Download the Rocketcad 15 zipfile from www.cadvision.com/whites 2. Unzip the file, maintaining the directory structure, onto your hard drive, typically C:. This should give the directories C:\Rocket C:\Rocket\Lisp C:\Rocket\Blocks C:\Rocket\Terminals each containing a number of files. The file manager program Windows Commander, available from http://www.ghisler.com is very useful for handling zip files and setting up directories. 3. Start AutoCAD. Open the Preferences dialog box by entering Config at the command prompt. 4. Under the Profiles tab, select Copy and call the resulting new profile Rocket. 5. Under the Files tab, double-click on Support File Search Path. Click the Add button, and add the directories created in step 2. Use the Move Up button to move the new directories C:\Rocket and C:\Rocket\Lisp to the top of the list. C:\Rocket should now be the top directory. This will ensure that the files in these directories are accessed and any other copies are ignored. Now click on "Menu, Help and Miscellaneous File Names" and change the menu to c:\Rocket\Electric.mnu. Make sure that the "File types" box displays *.mnu, not *.mnc, or you may not be able to see the file. Highlight Electric.mnu and press the Open button. Autocad will ask if you really want to overwrite your current menu. You do. 6. The Display Tab Set the crosshair size to 100%. People who are not familiar with AutoCAD or who learned on different systems often like minuscule cursors, but having the crosshairs span the entire screen makes them very easy to find in a hurry and is very handy for lining up drawing elements. So far as I can tell there is no advantage to tiny ones. I like to turn the scroll bars off and use the Pan and Zoom commands to move around, not wanting to permanently surrender any more screen space. An increasing number of my coworkers have so many toolbars and icons and boxes on the screen at all times that the area they have on screen is not much larger than a credit card. Increasingly they seem to be not draftsmen making drawings but technicians supervising some unknown process through a tiny viewport, and doing so on the machine's terms and not their own. There is damned little that you can do with icons that can't be done faster with keyboard shortcuts, and if you really want to be able to pick commands off the screen then try the screen menus, which Rocketcad has a pretty good set. Unlike icons they contain words, so you don't have to memorize what the fuzzy little pictures mean, and unlike icons they change to respond to what you are doing. I will also be posting a file with a list of the common key commands from the acad.pgp file which you can print out and use as a reference. 7. Open and Save File Save: Save as: - typically the default setting is ok, but if you are working with people using R14 you can make this the default file format so that they can read your files. Rocketcad sets this to ten minutes in the Acad2.lsp file - unless you are working on a very slow system an autosave takes almost no time - so if you want to change it you will have to do so there. (AutoSave files are saved under the name Auto.sv$, in the directory named under Temporary Drawing File Location under the Files pulldown. If your system crashes you can often recover your unsaved work by renaming this file to *.dwg and opening it normally.) Create Backup Copy With Each Save should be checked. Number of Recently Used Files to List: the default is four, but six or eight is probably a better number. Demand Load Xrefs: under Release 14 we had problems until we set this to Enabled With Copy. This doesn't seem to be required under 2000, but it doesn't seem to hurt anything either, it is at least worth keeping in mind. 8. Plotting: no changes are required. 9. System I don't like any of the startup dialogs offered, so I change this to Don't Show A Startup Dialog. 10. User Preferences I don't like having a dialog box appear when I hit Enter - 99% of the time when you hit Enter, what you actually want is an Enter, and having a little dialog box ask whether you wanted an Enter or maybe a side of fries is extremely irritating - again, it breaks up the flow of work and turns the computer from an amazing device which does half your work into another obstacle you have to surmount in order to get anything done. So turn "Shortcut Menus in Drawing Area" off. 11. Drafting: no changes. 12. Selection Turn "Noun Verb Selection" on. The ability to hilight a set of entities and then enter the command which will work on them (in addition to the traditional method of entering the command first and then selecting the entities) is a great improvement, and it seems to work even more smoothly with 2000. Now click on the OK button at the bottom of the box to save your changes. You should restart AutoCAD to make sure that the path structure has been updated. You should have proper icons in the screen menus and not happy faces, the icon menus should display pictures, and commands from the pulldown menus should work properly. If not: Troubleshooting. If something doesn't function correctly it is probably because AutoCAD can't find a file it needs, or has an old or incorrect copy. First go Config: Profiles, and make sure that you are using the Rocket profile. Then check your directories and the settings under the Files tab. The major configuration files which Rocketcad uses are: Acad.lsp, Acad2.lsp, AcadDoc.lsp, Acad.pgp, Acad.lin, and Electric.slb. They should all be located in the Rocket directory, so that if there are other copies of any of them on your system Rocketcad will see the correct ones first and ignore the others. The included utility Trouble.lsp will tell you which files you are using. If Trouble can't be run then you are probably not loading Acad2.lsp properly, which means that AutoCAD either can't find it or is using the wrong Acaddoc.lsp - this usually means that there is a path problem. The command (findfile "filename.ext") can be also used to see which copy of a specific file AutoCAD is using. Enter the text, including the brackets and quotation marks, at the command line, substituting the name of the file for which you are looking for filename.ext. Autocad will return the path to the copy of the file it is using, or nil if it can't find one. If it can't find one then you will have to either add it or add a path to it, if it is using the wrong one then you have to delete it or put the correct copy ahead of it in the path. Beyond this, reboot, look for corrupt files, make sure that AutoCAD itself is operating correctly, check to see that you have a computer and not an aquarium, call someone who knows what they are doing, email me.