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Have you ever opened up a consultant's autocad file and seen a message about proxygraphics or aecobjects. Simply put, this message is alerting you that the file you opened was produced by a different version of autocad. This may not seem like a big issue, however, if you look closely you will find that these aecobjects are autocad blocks that may actually vanish from your drawing when try to x-ref the drawing into your own file!
To fix this problem, we suggest handling all consultant's autocad files the following way:
1. Save a copy of the orignal autocad file. Incase something goes wrong, it's always good to have an original copy of your consultants file archived away.
2. Open the file and type AECTOACAD or EXPORTTOAUTOCAD. These commands will ask you to create a new file which will contain the flattened proxygraphics.
3. Close the file you are currently in and open the new file which you just created from step 2.
4. Select all of the objects/lines in the drawing and make sure that the linetype and lineweight is set to BY LAYER. This will make things much easier when you go to change layer colors in your drawing.
5. Check all of the blocks in the consultants drawing, and make sure they were drawn on the 0 layer. Similar to step 4, this ensures that you can change a block's color in your drawing.
6. X-Ref the new consultant's drawing into your own drawing.
While it may seem a bit tedious, we have found that using this process before x-refing a new drawing into your file will save you lots of time!
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