I'm in the process of 'learning' a new text editor and it struck me... what do other PcDmis users use? I use a few depending on the task...It's super helpful, makes life less of a pain especially when typing those really long variables.
I use these frequently:
Visual Studio (w/ emacs keyboard)
Notepad++ (has multi cursors!)
GNU Emacs
and of course regular old Notepad
Notepad++ is my favourite since a number of years. Mostly reading text files and searching for things, but also PC-DMIS Basic programming. Any other, real, programming happens in Delphi (Pascal) which is the best programming environment there is :-) The editor there knows all about the language and data structures, which gives it abilities far beyond what a simple text editor can do (almost automatic refactorings through the whole programming project, for example changing the name of the global variable "I" without disturbing any other letter "i" in the code, or local "I" variables).
If it is what it sounds like it is (and I hope I'm right), I can use it to write programming in it then copy/paste it into the DMIS program.
This would be useful to me right now because I have a set of code that I am copying and pasting throughout a program (constructed circle, group, dimensioning, assignment, end group, and a generic circle) and it is time consuming. I would use a subprogram but certain things change from feature to feature so that a single sub program wouldn't work. If a text editor does what I think it does then I would be able to copy/paste the code into DMIS then plug in the features needed in that set of code.
Unfortunately you can't paste text into PC-DMIS, so an external text editor is only useful if you do programming in other languages (PC-DMIS Basic, VB, C# etc.).
There is some possibility for PC-DMIS to import CSV-definitions of features, but I believe that's an option.
Your best bet for automating programming might be CAD-files with embedded annotations, GD&T etc.(PMI), as PC-DMIS can generate an almost complete program from that (if the annotations are correct). The STEP import is available in all versions, and supports PMI,