What is the best way to make a rebar table from a CAD drawing

[khoshravan]

Dear Civil Engineers

I have a drawing of rebars for a concrete beam as follows:

 

Example: 2x2T16(F.B.)/L=800

It consists:

1-position numbers inside circle. They are not typed them in above drawing.

2- number of rebars: 2x2=4 for two side of the beam

3-T: to show type of the rebar. Here all of them is one type and no need for this letter.

4- 16: size of the rebar, that is diameter of the rebar is 16 mm

5- (F.B.): show the location of the rebar. Here they are on to side face of the cross section. Others or top and bot and add for added

6- L: is the total length of the bar. Here it is 800 mm.

All these numbers are typed by a draftsman and I should extract them manually into a table to produce list of rebars beam by beam, which is a tedious and time consuming job prone to mistakes.

I think there must be an easy way by putting these figures into another property of the drawn lines (maybe attribute) and the table could be constructed automatically using a lisp or a cad command. So I want to learn this method and instruct the draftsman to put those figures in proper place for my future works.

Second question: missing position numbers. Is there an easy way to populate these position numbers?

I think there must be other techniques or software for making these drawings and extracting the rebar table, but at present I have no choice except using AutoCAd for drawing these beams and making the table. Will be happy to hear your experience and comments and new software for this purpose.

[CyberAngel]

This is partly a data problem. You might be able to create a dynamic block, which you can move and scale to fit the various sizes of column (or footing or whatever). The block contains attributes for each piece of data, which you can read/export fairly easily. It's also easy to select a specific type of block, put them in a set, and process each one.

 

It's also partly a drafting problem. With different lengths for the codes, it's hard to use separate attributes, because they'll overlap. You could include code to input/validate and output/filter a group of codes, but there's no way to prevent someone from manually breaking your system.

 

I can't tell what the "position numbers" mean, so I can't tell you how to generate them.

 

There is software out there for drawing and labeling rebar. Some of them cost money. I don't know if you can generate the labels the way you need to, or if there's a way to customize them. AutoLISP has the benefit of being free (apart from the time you spend writing and debugging it), and it's infinitely customizable.

[khoshravan]

17 hours ago, CyberAngel said:

I can't tell what the "position numbers" mean, so I can't tell you how to generate them.

Thanks for your reply. Position numbers are the serial number of table of rebars, put in the drawing, for ease of referencing.