Tuesday, February 18, 2014

AutoCAD Educational Version - Plot Stamp Not Detected!

There was a change in AutoCAD 2014 SP1 that can put you in problems. If you open, plot or save a drawing you will not be aware that the drawing have been saved with an Educational version of AutoCAD and thus unknowingly infecting a lot of drawings that you will have problem to use in older versions. I think this is a very dangerous bug that was introduced. In AutoCAD 2014 without SP1, AutoCAD 2013 and older you will see this dialog box. “Educational Version - Plot Stamp Detected This drawing will display the message, "PRODUCED BY AN AUTODESK EDUCATIONAL PRODUCT," Do you want to continue? If you continue, the message will mark this drawing and any drawings that reference it.”

The plan is that in AutoCAD 2015 it will be possible to save drawings with the plot stamp and then have it removed permanently. That is at least good news. I guess it will also work with Autodesk DWG TrueView 2015 and DWG Convert to batch re-save drawings to get rid of the stamp.

Here’s a quote from an Autodesk employee in the AutoCAD forum:

“The educational plot stamp has been a part of the Educational version of AutoCAD for a long time. It was meant to prevent commercial use being done with an educational version of the product. Recently, a decision was made to no longer show this stamp, even on files created with the EDU version. Starting with the installation of SP1 for the 2014 products, files will no longer show the stamp when plotting, nor will they give a warning message when opening them. However, the stamp is still attached to the file even though it is not showing.”

“So yes, the danger is that someone with 2014 SP1 could open a file and work on it without realizing it has the educational stamp on it. If they then send that to someone without SP1, or on an earlier version, that user will see the warning and the stamp. At this time, using 2014 with SP1 will still propagate the stamp to other drawings, as in the past. The current plan (and please keep in mind that this could change), but the current plan is that the 2015 version will have the ability to remove the stamp altogether if a Save is performed. You'd then be able to save a file in 2015, and send it back to users on earlier versions, and the stamp will be gone altogether. More information will be provided on this as we go on as to what the final implementation will be.”

See also this knowledge base article explaining more about the Educational Plot Stamp.

If you want to identify drawings with the Educational Plot Stamp try our EduFinder app that is able to batch process all your drawings and find those with the stamp. Due to the change in AutoCAD 2014 SP1 the app might not be able to find them unless you also have for example AutoCAD 2013 installed or remove the AutoCAD 2014 SP1.

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