2012

Table Of Contents
To reduce the size of drawing files, it is recommended that you perform a full
save (with ISAVEPERCENT set to 0) before transmitting or archiving a drawing.
Work Internationally
If you share drawing files with companies in other countries and regions, the
drawing file names might contain characters that are not used in other
languages.
If a drawing file is created in a different language version of the operating
system, the following will occur:
If support for the language is installed, the file name characters are visible
in Windows Explorer.
If support for the language is not installed, the file name characters appear
as a series of boxes in Windows Explorer and a dialog box is displayed
offering to install the language pack.
In either case, you will be able to open the drawing file beginning with
AutoCAD 2007 because the product is Unicode-compliant.
NOTE If you share drawing files with companies using earlier releases of the
product, you can avoid file name issues for Asian languages and languages that
use accented characters. In those circumstances, do not use high ASCII values, or
values of 80 hexadecimal and above, when creating a file name.
Maintain Compatibility with Large Object Limits
Drawings saved to a legacy drawing file format (AutoCAD 2007 or earlier) do
not support objects greater than 256MB. With the drawing file format, these
limitations have been removed allowing you to save objects that are greater
in size.
When saving to a legacy drawing file format (AutoCAD 2007 or earlier), the
drawing cannot contain large objects; there might be compatibility issues with
trying to open the drawing. The LARGEOBJECTSUPPORT system variable
controls the large object size limits used and the warning messages displayed
when a drawing is saved.
The following explains how object size limits for drawings is determined:
Drawing files cannot exceed an internal size limit of 4GB. This size is based
on the total size of all objects in a drawing when uncompressed. Since a
drawing file is normally compressed, the final size of a saved drawing file
on disk will vary based on the size and number of objects in a drawing.
240 | Chapter 7 Open or Save a Drawing