Have you ever wanted to run a script file on one or more drawings, without having to use the overhead of the entire AutoCAD application? Starting with AutoCAD 2013, you can. AutoCAD 2013 and later comes with a tiny application named AcCoreConsole.exe. (The AutoCAD Core Console). This is basically a stripped down version of the AutoCAD engine without the graphics screen. Talk about the ultimate “classic” interface!
So you might be thinking “AutoCAD is a graphics program…what do I want with a command line only interface?” At its most basic level, you can feed the Core Console a single script file that can create and edit entities and save those edits to a DWG file. Take this a step further and combine the Core Console with ScriptPro from Autodesk and you’ll probably be processing script files, on multiple drawings, faster than ever.
I created a small script file that creates a few entities, makes an edit and then saves this work to a DWG file, and it runs and completes in about 2.5 seconds. You can barely get the splash screen to go away in 2.5 seconds when using full blown AutoCAD. Kean Walmsley over at Through the Interface has a much more in depth post on this application, and the AutoCAD Tips blog has a post on doing some more complex things with this tool, including batch plotting a set of DWG files to PDF.
What do you think about this? Are you already using it? If so, what kind of things are you doing with it?
