Hey Guys, I've lurked around on here a bit before, but decided today to make an account solely for this question. I work for a gas company, and I am looking at maps for five districts. Each district is broken down into what appears to be between 50- several hundred map sections each. We have an autocad file for each of these sections, and hard copies as well. I'm basically needing to put them all together in succession to better do the job I've been given. I'm somewhat familiar with basic, but know essentially nothing about LISP. I was wondering if I could use it to aid in my compiling of maps. Basically each map section has a number on each of the 4 sides, and this indicates the continuation of the master map. So the particular drawing I'm looking at has a 102 on the top and a 100 on the bottom and the sides are blank. What I would like to do is to set it up so that I can either make the program read the number and then use "ddinsert" to insert the next drawing, or perhaps make a dialogue box to prompt me with the numbers in rapid succession, and then I can possibly use the align command to show it where to go. When I am inserting all of these, they are the same size, so my train of commands thus far have been "DDINSERT" and then when the file selection prompt appears, I type the number I'm looking for as all of the files are simply titled as the map number they represent, and then it inserts the drawing. Then since they are all the same size, I only need to do a "move" command and locate the new drawing's corner to the next successive drawing's corresponding corner. It is relatively simple, but If I could speed the process up, I would love it. Also if I could "BURST" each drawing when it is inserted that would help, as I need to do so for altering the blocks anyhow. If anyone has some direction for me, I' strongly appreciate it.  Thanks Guys!

Have you ever thought of making a gis (geographic information system) by importing your spatial data from CAD to some spatial database (oracle spatial for example). At my company we have about 15 layers (types) of utilities covering large area and we store all data (raster, geometry, attributes) in oracle spatial database. Also there is a oracle spatial editor available on free cad platform (google for "oracle spatial addon for cad") in case that you don't want to buy costly gis software (esri, autodesk map...).

We're working on a GIS system from what I understand. This is only my second week to the company. I did some more research on lunch and now have a working command to insert the maps and it has sped things along, but I still need to do some alterations. As far as the GIS system goes, I'm not involved in it's development and have not even seen it yet. I appreciate the feedback though! Thanks,Damon