MCP Connector for AutoCAD Documentation

Annotative dimensions at their paper size, honest xref status, a stated closure contract, published batchability (189 tools)

• Annotative dimensions plot at their paper size. A dimension made through the connector in an annotative style never received its own annotative flag, so its text stayed at the style's paper height in model units - a hundred times too small on a 1:100 sheet - and making it annotative afterwards had AutoCAD preserve that look with shrunken size overrides. The flag is set at creation, the overrides are put back to the style (overridesReset), and viewports the connector creates or rescales carry the matching annotation scale. get_entity_properties reads a dimension's annotative state, scales, effective sizes and overrides; viewports report annotationScale.
• list_xrefs status is AutoCAD's own. A loaded overlay stored with a relative path read not_found because the saved path was tested from the wrong folder. Status now comes from the xref status, the path is resolved against the host drawing's folder, and the reply separates savedPath, resolvedPath, pathType and fileExists, agreeing with the folder audit.
• Closure check states what it proves. closureCheck carries closedWithin (the bound closure is proven to), measurementResolution (what a gap length is good to) and undetectedGapBound; a gap fails the tolerance when its length plus the resolution exceeds it, and a tolerance below the detection bound is honoured with a note rather than a claim of exact proof.
• Batchability published. ping lists every tool run_batch refuses under batch.excluded with a reason; the refusal names it too.

Four fixes from the 2.1.7 acceptance pass: sheet viewports, exact closure, table flow, dynamic status (189 tools)

• Sheet viewports target the drawing, not the paper. Every layout carries AutoCAD's own paper-space viewport, and the connector told it apart by a number AutoCAD only assigns on the current tab. With the template not current, create_sheets_from_layout set that viewport and reported success while the real one kept its view. The paper-space viewport is now identified from the layout's saved viewport record, so an index means the same viewport whether the layout is current or not, before or after it is opened, and on a copy never opened. list_viewports names it in paperSpaceViewports; the batch reply is the final state of every viewport, layer state included, and sheets land in the order requested.
• Closure is proven, not sampled. The closure check tests the outline at every curve end and vertex as well as at intervals, then locates each gap's ends by bisection, so an opening between two curve ends is found whatever its size and its length is the length drawn. closureCheck.closure reads closed / open / indeterminate; closed is true only when proven, and indeterminate says why the check could not tell. With gapTolerance, an unproven stretch longer than the tolerance fails the figure.
• Table flow direction. set_table_style and create_table_style accept flowDirection down and up (both were refused) and read it back the same way. Row-height wording corrected: a row is the font's line box plus two margins.
• Dynamic status. insert_block and import_blocks placements report isDynamic from the committed reference, agreeing with get_dynamic_block_properties.

Field-test fixes, batching, raster tracing and sheets that know where the paper is - nine new tools (189 tools)

• One round trip. New run_batch runs a list of tool calls in one trip as one undo step, every result back in order, with the calls that cannot sit in a batch refused by name. create_dimension_linear takes points for a whole chain along a wall with an overall. A plan that took a hundred calls takes twenty.
• Trace a scan or a photograph. New trace_image reads an attached image back as pixels and traces it into polylines, arcs or splines placed over the picture: dark linework on a light ground, or the edges in a photograph, with a region, squaring for facades, gap joining and corner clean-up. New calibrate_image scales image and linework to a known dimension; paperScale sizes a scan from the DPI in the file.
• Sheets that know where the paper is. get_page_setup and set_page_setup return the sheet edge and printable area in paper coordinates, so a border lands on the paper rather than the printable corner. set_page_setup takes orientation with the paper size and switches Display plot styles and Plot with plot styles. New free list_paper_sizes covers ISO, JIS, ANSI and ARCH with the plotter's media names and the scale tables; every scale reads imperial notation such as 1/4" = 1'-0". set_layer_properties turns a layer off, which hides a viewport frame and keeps the view.
• Batch sheets. New create_sheets_from_layout copies a template per sheet and sets viewport scales, view centres, layer states and title texts, validated before anything is written.
• Table styles. New list_table_styles, create_table_style and set_table_style; create_table honours its style, takes per-table text heights, margins and column widths, and reads back the laid-out format.
• Import and place. New import_blocks brings block definitions in from a library DWG, unit scale handled, and places them in the same call.
• Closure check. Every boundary trace samples its outline against the drawn geometry and reports any gap it bridged; gapTolerance makes a longer gap fail the call. label_areas keeps labels clear of door swings and labels at the room's centroid.
• Fixes. create_block_definition applied the base point twice. create_text ignored justification, the text style and a fixed style height. Annotative dimensions created through the API carried no scale and drew nothing. create_table dropped its headers and style. add_revision_to_layouts adds a row to a revision table instead of writing over it; export_drawing_register is one row per sheet; new_drawing takes a template by name.

Saving the live selection, an honest tool count and a caveat on boundary tracing (180 tools)

• Selection saved. save_selection_set without handles failed and cleared the selection, because entering a command context clears the pick-first set. It now runs in application context, saves what is selected and leaves it selected.
• Tool count parity. ping counts the tools actually served to the client, reports command execution as available only when it is callable, and names withheld opt-in tools in gatedTools.
• Boundary resolution caveat. Point-mode tracing reports the view width it resolved at and warns when that is far wider than the region found, so a bridged opening is flagged rather than silent.

Four fixes from the field (180 tools)

• Saved paper size on plot. plot_to_pdf and dwg_folder_to_pdf plotted an A3 sheet on the device's default paper on a cold session and cropped it; the layout's saved size is now read before the device is touched, with a warning whenever a different size is used.
• No dialog hang. A failed boundary trace no longer leaves AutoCAD waiting for someone to click a dialog at the machine.
• Viewport size and scale. set_viewport no longer lets a size change overwrite the scale asked for in the same call.
• detect_units reports its candidate score breakdown again.

Area takeoff to the internal face, annotative annotation, the drawing register and the revision workflow - twelve new tools (180 tools)

• Inward offset for GIA. offset_entity takes direction "inward" or "outward" on a closed loop, resolved by measuring the enclosed area, so it is right whichever way the loop was drawn; the response reports areaBefore and areaAfter, and an offset that would collapse the loop is refused with the reason. create_boundary takes an inset, turning a boundary traced along wall centrelines into the internal face in one call. throughX/throughY, count and eraseOriginal on offset_entity are implemented.
• Annotative annotation. New set_annotative sets the flag and the scale representations together, because annotation only appears at scales it carries; scales the drawing lacks are added. New free list_annotation_scales.
• Style creation. New create_text_style and create_dimension_style refuse a name that already exists. Dimension styles gain colours, lineweights, fit behaviour, units format, zero suppression, fixed extension length and the annotative flag; text styles gain annotative, vertical, mirrored and big-font.
• Drawing register. New export_drawing_register builds a register from title-block attributes, one row per drawing and layout, matching register fields to attribute tags on its own. New update_drawing_register patches an existing register in place, keeping the workbook's formatting, and adds an issue column for the revision.
• Revision workflow. New add_revision_to_layouts writes revision, date and description into title blocks across chosen layouts or a whole folder, dry run first, and reports plainly which fields it could not write when a title block has no tag for them.
• Named selection sets. New save_selection_set, recall_selection_set, list_selection_sets and delete_selection_set, stored in the drawing so they survive save and reopen without changing how picking behaves. Erased members are reported, not dropped.
• Bulk geometry read. get_entities takes format: "compact" - columns and rows with geometry as flat number arrays and a legend - and entities outside the requested page are no longer opened just to be counted. A 13,000-entity model with geometry now comes back in one call.
• Selection reads fixed and widened. get_selected_geometry returned nothing for any selection because it ran inside a command context, which clears the pick-first set; it now covers blocks with their attributes, hatches with their loops, MText, text, dimensions and wipeouts.
• Clips report honestly. New free get_clip_boundary reads a clip back in drawing coordinates. clip_underlay takes a boundaryHandle to clip to an existing polyline, and no longer claims to have inverted an image clip, which the API cannot do.
• ping reports the edition, the tools served and a capability matrix naming the tool that proves each feature, so a tool missing for want of a licence is no longer indistinguishable from one this build never had.

Plotting honours the page setup, and sheet sets from one drawing (168 tools)

• Plots match the layout. plot_to_pdf now plots at the layout's saved page setup - plot area Layout, saved scale, saved paper size - instead of forcing extents and fit-to-paper, which shifted a finished sheet and let one entity parked off the paper shrink the whole plot. paperSize, scale, plotArea, styleSheet and centered are implemented and echoed back; plotArea: "extents" is computed from the entities at plot time rather than a cached value.
• Sheet sets. layoutNames or plotAllLayouts plot several layouts of one drawing into a single multi-page PDF. Layouts on different paper sizes cannot share one PDF document, so they are written as one PDF per layout with a note. The tab you were on is restored.
• Copies land where they came from. copy_to_original_coordinates pastes into the space the source entity occupies rather than whichever tab happened to be current, with a targetSpace override. An in-drawing copy now works at all.
• Transparency round-trips. set_layer_properties and change_entity_properties write transparency and the layer plot flag as their schemas always said; list_layers and get_entity_properties read them back. change_entity_properties also takes linetype scale and plot style name.
• detect_units scores from the sampled entity sizes when the drawing extents are implausible, instead of reporting no measurable extents beside a sampler that clearly measured. count_block_references suggests near misses one edit away. get_entity_properties returns viewport geometry.

Tools report truthfully - eleven field-report items closed, one new read tool (168 tools)

• Areas disclose islands. measure_areas and label_areas in point mode report outerArea, netArea, islandCount and each island beside the net figure; outerLoopOnly measures to the outer boundary.
• Hatch patterns already in the drawing. create_hatch copies a pattern from a resident hatch when no .pat file provides it; an unknown name says which source failed. New free list_hatch_patterns.
• Atomic dynamic-block writes. set_dynamic_block_properties validates the whole batch before writing anything and always returns applied and rejected; properties carry an index and can be addressed as "#3" when names repeat.
• Batch reads survive erased handles. get_entity_properties lists an erased entity in errors and returns the rest; nothing readable is success: true, count: 0.
• Zoom reads the view back. zoom_extents, zoom_window and zoom_object return the centre, height, width and extents actually shown and fail if the view did not take; a view-target bug that sent surveys hundreds of kilometres off screen is fixed.
• Display and screenshots. set_draw_order regenerates afterwards; capture_screenshot regenerates first and reports the written file's dimensions.
• Honest redo, units and counts. redo refuses after an intervening call; detect_units separates the current setting from the guess with a confidence band; count_block_references groups by layer and refuses unknown block names.
• Boundary detection makes the target space current, retries with the space in view and then in shrinking windows around the point, and restores the previous tab and view; the error names the precondition.
• dwg_folder_to_pdf writes a drawing whose layouts use different paper sizes as one PDF per layout, with a note, instead of failing on the second sheet.

38 new tools - undo and checkpoints, sheets and viewports, layer states, hatch by pick point, area takeoff, stretch, draw order, clouds and wipeouts, dynamic blocks, underlays, polyline editing, styles - plus paper space for reads and creation, one error envelope, and eleven fixes

• Undo and checkpoints. create_checkpoint marks a point (optionally saving a copy of the drawing to disk), rollback_checkpoint reverts everything since it in one step and is refused when no mark exists so it can never undo the whole drawing by accident, and undo / redo step through changes one tool call at a time (redo must be the very next call after undo; even a read in between clears AutoCAD's redo stack). Every editing tool call now runs as its own AutoCAD command, so each one is an undo step in the drawing's own history too. Read-only tools no longer take a document lock, so an MCP read no longer cancels a command you are in the middle of typing. Folder and batch tools work on files on disk and are outside this undo
• Sheets. duplicate_layout, rename_layout, delete_layout, get_page_setup and set_page_setup (device, paper size matched against the device's list, style sheet, plot area, scale, rotation, centring); list_viewports, set_viewport (scale as 1:100, view centre, position, size, twist, lock, on/off) and set_viewport_layers for per-viewport freeze. create_viewport now honours locked, frozenLayers, twist and a 1:100 scale string
• Layer states. save_layer_state, restore_layer_state (globally or into one viewport), delete_layer_state, list_layer_states
• Drafting. create_boundary (BOUNDARY around a point, islands included), create_hatch by pick point (seedX / seedY), measure_areas and label_areas (areas converted to m² or ft², labels at each centroid, optional schedule table), stretch_entities, set_draw_order, create_revcloud, create_wipeout, edit_polyline (vertices, bulge, width, reverse, close, fillet every corner)
• Blocks. get_dynamic_block_properties and set_dynamic_block_properties (visibility states, flips, lookups, distances), insert_block with dynamicProperties, replace_block (attributes carried by tag), rename_block
• Underlays. attach_image, attach_pdf_underlay, clip_underlay (xref, image and PDF clips, rectangle or polygon) and set_image_display (fade, contrast, brightness, monochrome, show/hide)
• Styles and text. set_text_style, set_dimension_style, create_mtext with a background mask, match_properties; save_view, restore_view, delete_view; text search and replace can include block attributes, dimension override text and table cells; get_entities accepts an array of entity types
• Reads see paper space. get_entities, get_entity_count, find_text, replace_text and count_text_patterns take a space parameter: model (default, unchanged), current, all, or a layout name. Every entity and match carries a space field. Title blocks, revision text, sheet notes and viewports were invisible to these tools before; a layout read as empty
• Creation tools target a layout. Twenty-five creation tools (lines through dimensions, text, hatch, table, leader, block insertion, 3D primitives) take the same space parameter to create on a named layout or the current tab. copy_entities, mirror_entities, offset_entity, the array tools, explode_entity and trim_entity keep their result in the space the source occupies, so a copied sheet note stays on the sheet
• One error envelope. A tool that could not do what was asked always answers {success: false, error, result}. Some failures used to come back as success: true with the message under result.error, and others as success: false, so a client had to check both. The payload stays under result
• create_hatch rebuilt. boundaryPoints works (it was advertised and always rejected). Several boundaryHandles are an outer loop plus islands, so a face with openings is one call instead of strips and temporary polylines. Patterns resolve as predefined, then a .pat on the support path, then a pattern an existing hatch in the drawing already carries. An unknown name is refused by name, saying where it was looked for; an open boundary is refused with the reason
• create_leader creates a multileader. textHeight and arrowSize are applied, style is selectable, and the result is one MLeader rather than a leader plus a detached text. Returns handle (leaderHandle kept as an alias)
• get_entity_properties: MText height reads the character height (it read the boundary height, 0 on almost every note); a hatch that cannot report an area no longer fails the whole call, and hatches report pattern, scale, angle, style, associativity and boundary handles
• get_entities: boundingBox is applied (it was advertised and ignored); matched is the total the filters select, with total as an alias
• select_by_filter: mode chooses crossing (default) or window semantics for withinExtents; space limits the search to one space (default all, as before); results carry layer and space
• create_block_definition now says what it does (copy, originals left in place) and adds insertReference alongside eraseOriginals for move-and-replace, returning the reference handle
• Version reporting. ping and get_drawing_info report the connector version, the AutoCAD release and whether a read-only session is active
• Booleans on AutoCAD 2022 to 2024: boolean_union, boolean_subtract and boolean_intersect now erase the second solid explicitly. AutoCAD 2025 and later consume it inside the operation; 2022 to 2024 left it in the drawing, so a union reported success and a stray solid survived on top of the result
• capture_screenshot was fixed in v2.0.1 (the PNG is on disk before the tool returns) but not listed in those notes

Security hardening and layer tool fixes

• Security hardening of the connector's local communication channel and its diagnostics
• Diagnostic logging is now off by default. Set MCPCONNECTOR_LOG_ENABLED=1 and restart AutoCAD to collect a log for support
• create_layer now applies description, plot and transparency, and list_layers now honours its filter parameter

Trim and extend rebuilt, text search fixed on non-Latin drawings, honest batch reporting, and four breaking changes

• trim_entity and extend_entity now work, and no longer remove the cutting edge. Neither tool trimmed or extended anything: both erased the boundary instead and left the target untouched, while reporting success, and both left the command open so later command-driven tools did nothing. AutoCAD 2021 and later default TRIM to Quick mode, in which it does not prompt for cutting edges, so the boundary was consumed as the object to trim. Both tools are rebuilt on the AutoCAD geometry API and never touch the cutting edges. Breaking: trim_entity now takes a point on the portion to remove (removeX, removeY, removeZ, plus extendBoundaries), because trimming has always needed to know which side to cut. The classic trim between two cutting edges still needs no point, and where the answer is ambiguous the tool refuses and says so rather than guessing. extend_entity gains an optional extendStart; omit it and the tool extends whichever end reaches a boundary soonest
• Text search and replace fixed on Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Cyrillic, Greek and accented drawings. AutoCAD stores characters outside the drawing code page as \U+XXXX escapes, and DWGs exported from Revit carry their text that way. Every search compared against the stored string, so a search for a Japanese word returned nothing on a drawing full of it, while a search for a single Latin letter matched the hex digits inside the escapes. find_text, replace_text and count_text_patterns now decode before matching, and each replacement is written back in the encoding that entity already used. find_text also reports the encoding and the stored text, so an escaped drawing is visible rather than something you have to infer
• get_entities paging works. offset was never implemented, so anything past the first page was unreachable. It is implemented now, with offset, matched and hasMore in the response
• Modification tools work outside model space. fillet_entities, chamfer_entities, break_entity, lengthen_entity, join_entities, align_entities and convert_to_polyline drive an AutoCAD command, and a command acts on the current space, while every creation tool writes to model space. With a sheet layout current, which is how most company templates open, none of them found anything to act on. They now switch to the space the target entities are in, run, and put the layout back
• Breaking: get_entity_properties always returns an entities array. It used to return a flat object for one handle and a wrapped array for several, so code written against result.entities broke on the single-handle case. It is now always {success, count, entities, errors} - read result.entities[0].radius rather than result.radius
• Breaking: folder tools report success only when every drawing succeeded. Thirteen batch tools returned success no matter how many drawings failed, so a caller checking success was told the job was done while files had been skipped. success is now false if any file failed. The per-file detail is unchanged, so a caller still sees exactly which drawings failed and why
• New: read-only session. A checkbox in the connection dialog removes every tool that modifies a drawing from the session, and refuses it by name if called. An administrator policy value can force it on machine-wide, so it can be handed to a team as a guarantee rather than a preference
• Batch failures name the cause. A drawing open in AutoCAD, or locked by a colleague on a network share, used to fail with a bare error code. It now names the file and the reason, keeping the underlying AutoCAD status in brackets for support
• title_block_update accepts an omitted blockNameFilter, so the schema and the behaviour now agree
• F1 on the ribbon button opens these docs in the AutoCAD help viewer
• Folder-wide audits and batch PDF plotting run in a separate process, which keeps large folders reliable
• The in-product update check is removed. The connector no longer checks for updates and no longer contacts a version endpoint. Outbound network calls are limited to licence activation, deactivation and validation. Check the product page for new releases

Excel tools fixed on AutoCAD 2027, and refreshed components

• Excel read and write fixed on AutoCAD 2027. AutoCAD 2027 ships its own copy of the spreadsheet library the connector uses, and its copy was winning, so any tool that read or wrote an .xlsx failed. The connector now loads its own copy in isolation. Verified across 2022, 2025 and 2027
• Fixed a load failure on AutoCAD 2022 to 2024 introduced by the component refresh
• Runtime and support components updated to current releases

Crash fix on xref reporting, and tools that work before a drawing is open

• Fixed an AutoCAD crash in xref_report. Reporting on a drawing whose xref graph contained unresolved references could take AutoCAD down on 2025 to 2027. The cycle detection is now done in managed code, so a broken graph is reported rather than fatal
• 17 tools now run with no drawing open. The folder-batch suite plus open_drawing and new_drawing work from a cold AutoCAD session. Tools that do need a drawing now say so and point you at open_drawing instead of failing obscurely

Reliability and installer update - recommended for everyone

• Fixed the add-in not loading automatically when AutoCAD starts - it now installs to the plugin location modern AutoCAD trusts. If tools previously appeared only after loading the connector manually, this update resolves that
• Choose which AutoCAD versions (2022-2027) to install for, with installed versions detected automatically
• Silent, unattended installation for enterprise deployment, with a matching silent uninstall

First release

• Drive AutoCAD 2022-2027 from any MCP client with natural language - a free tier plus the full Pro tool set