Jim's Tools

Productivity tools for Engineers and Drafters

Jim's Tools started as a personal collection of mostly small and uninteresting, but useful LISP routines for AutoCAD. I would offer them to my co-workers to help them out. Pretty soon they were asking for me to set up "Jim's Tools" on their computers at home, or their friend's computer at another company.

The two most popular ones are EC Pro and XLayer. I have added them here to help people stay up to date and informed.

I may share some of the other programs I have developed over time if I feel they are tested well enough and useful enough to others. If you've used one of my "tools" and think it would be a good candidate for public release, just drop me a line and I will consider it!

EC Pro started as a simple concept of calculating elevations from 2 picked points in CAD and eliminating having to use a calculator. The numbers were dumped to the Text Screen in AutoCAD and you had to copy/paste or transcribe them into a label manually. It has evolved into a robust designing and labeling tool which offers both Free and Paid versions. I have invested thousands of programming hours and ten times as many practical use hours to develop this into the most powerful tool for grading, streets, utilities, and whatever else you need to calculate elevations and slopes that does not rely on expensive proprietary CAD systems like Civil 3D.

XLayer makes it easy to change Layer Properties. I wrote XLayer when I first started out in the Civil Engineering Land Development industry in 2000. Since then it's been used hundreds of thousands of times. I offer it for free since most of the code early in my programming "career" was cobbled, hacked, and pasted together from various sources to make this very useful but very ugly tool.

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