How-To Guide

Check and Fix CAD Standards Across Every Drawing: Find With Tornado, Fix With Hurricane

Published October 2026 | 74mph Solutions

Friday, 4pm. The submittal goes out Monday. The owner's CAD standard says no missing fonts, no missing xrefs, only approved layers, everything purged. There are 300 drawings in the set, and somebody has to open every one of them and check.

At two or three minutes a drawing, that is 10 to 15 hours of opening, looking and closing. And it still only tells you what is wrong. Fixing it is another pass.

300 drawings. Checked by hand: 10 to 15 hours, then the fixing. Tornado + Hurricane: one report, one fix run, one re-check.

There is a faster loop: find every problem in one report with Tornado DWG Scanner, fix them all in one run with Hurricane, then prove it by running the same report again.

Know which drawings fail before the client does.

Both have free trials with no time limit.

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What AutoCAD Gives You, and Where It Stops

AutoCAD has standards tools, and they are worth using if you have a .dws standards file. But each one covers a slice:

Tool	Many drawings?	What it checks	Fixes?	In AutoCAD LT?
CHECKSTANDARDS	No, the open drawing	Layers, dimension, text and multileader styles, linetypes	One violation at a time	No
Batch Standards Checker	Yes	The same style types only	No, report only	No
Reference Manager	Yes	Missing xrefs, fonts, images; paths	Repaths	No
Data Extraction	Yes	Raw attribute and property data	No	No

None of them checks, across a whole set: DWG version, units, LTSCALE, DIMSCALE, plot style mode, page setups and plotters, proxies, zero-length objects, purge candidates, file size or title-block completeness. That is the gap.

Step 1: Find Every Problem With Tornado

Tornado DWG Scanner runs your checks on every drawing in a folder tree, using your own AutoCAD, and gives you one row per drawing and one column per check.

80 checks in 12 categories: DWG version, units, LTSCALE, DIMSCALE, plot style mode, current layer, page setups and plotters, missing fonts, missing xrefs, images and PDFs, absolute xref paths, proxies, zero-length objects, purge candidates, file size, title-block attributes, audit errors and more.
Your standard, as a recipe: pick the checks your office cares about and the value each one should have. No .dws file needed.
Pass or fail: set the expected value once (units, LTSCALE, a title-block tag) and the grid flags the drawings that break it. The Flagged view hides everything that passed.
Reusable recipes: save the report once and run it on every project.
A report you can hand on: Excel export keeps the flag colors; CSV and JSON for QA records.

Step 2: Fix Them All With Hurricane

Export the failing drawings from Tornado as a file list. Tornado finds Hurricane's file-list folder automatically, so the list loads straight into Hurricane's queue. Then one script fixes the whole list, for example:

;Bring drawings to the office standard
;Units: millimeters (INSUNITS 4)
INSUNITS
4
LTSCALE
1
;Layer A-WALL to color 1 (red); the blank line ends -LAYER
-LAYER
C
1
A-WALL

;Purge twice to catch nested items
-PURGE
A
*
N
-PURGE
A
*
N

Test before you batch: your standard is not ours. Layer names, colors, units and prompts differ between offices, drawings and AutoCAD versions, so run the script on a few drawings (or copies) first and adjust any line that does not match. QSAVE is left out on purpose: Hurricane adds the save to every drawing when it builds the batch script (or a SAVEAS, when you save into a new folder). Running a script by hand with the SCRIPT command? Then add QSAVE as the last line.

You do not have to write it by hand: Hurricane's Command Capture records the fix while you make it once in AutoCAD, and its wizards handle common jobs such as text search and replace and title blocks (those wizards use AutoLISP, so they need full AutoCAD or AutoCAD LT 2024 and later). New to scripts? See the AutoCAD Scripts (.scr) Guide.

Step 3: Prove It

Run the same Tornado report on the same list. When the Flagged view is empty, export the Excel report for your records. You know the set passes your checks before it goes out.

Audit, fix, re-audit. One loop for the whole set.

Free trials, no time limit.

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When to Run the Loop

Before a submittal. Many owners, such as government agencies and universities, publish CAD standards and reject files that fail them. Tornado helps you check before you send.
When consultant drawings arrive. Check what you received before it enters your project.
At project closeout. Purge, fonts, xrefs and title blocks, before the set is archived.
After a server move. Find every missing xref and absolute path across the whole tree.
Before a big batch plot. Page setups, plotters, plot styles and LTSCALE, all at once.

What You Need

Tornado: full AutoCAD 2018 or later on Windows (AutoCAD LT is not supported yet). Free trial: no time limit, 10 files per run, all checks.
Hurricane: AutoCAD (2026 and all prior versions), AutoCAD LT, BricsCAD, IntelliCAD or DraftSight. Free trial: no time limit, no credit card.
Both are local Windows programs. Your drawings never leave your PC.

FAQ

Is Batch Standards Checker enough?

It checks style names and layer properties against a .dws, which is useful. It does not check units, LTSCALE, fonts, xrefs, proxies or purge, and it does not fix anything. Use it alongside Tornado if you already have a .dws.

Does Tornado fix drawings?

No. Tornado finds and reports. Hurricane makes the fixes in batch, and Tornado re-checks them.

Do I need a .dws standards file?

No. You set your standard up in Tornado itself, as a recipe: the checks your office cares about and the value each one should have. Save it once and run it on every project.

Does this work in AutoCAD LT?

Hurricane works in AutoCAD LT. Tornado needs full AutoCAD 2018 or later for now.

Monday, 9am: the submittal goes out, and you already know every drawing passed your checks.

Try both free.
No time limit.

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