Ashlar-Vellum Plug-in for Spotlight on Mac

An Ashlar-Vellum plug-in is available for Graphite™ CAD software for Apple’s Spotlight. Spotlight is the new deep-search feature found in Mac OS X (10.4 Tiger or later).

This plug-in is freely downloadable but may not be redistributed. When used with Graphite Share, the Graphite Spotlight plug-in is a terrific combination for sharing and exploring Graphite files on systems without Graphite installed.

For more information about Spotlight, visit the Spotlight page on www.apple.com.

Graphite Plug-in for Spotlight

This Spotlight plug-in extracts information from Ashlar-Vellum Graphite computer-aided drafting files and places the information in Apple’s Spotlight metadata store. Once stored, Spotlight and the various OS X Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard applications can use the extracted information for fast file searches.

Within Spotlight, the file kind for all Graphite files is document. Keywords for extracted metadata are:

  • Text
  • Creator:
    • (always “Ashlar-Vellum Graphite”)
  • Authors:
    • (1st entry, who created the file)
    • (2nd entry, who modified it last)
  • Organizations:
    • (1st entry, who created the file)
    • (2nd entry, who modified it last)
  • Layers
  • Symbols
  • Work Planes
  • View Orientations
  • Sheets
  • Models
  • Views:
    • (detail views)

The Spotlight plug-in extracts all the text in a Graphite CAD file and places it in a block for easy searching. This is analogous to body text in an email or text document.

Other keywords may be available on Graphite files. Spotlight handles these keywords, and the metadata they show, for the documents on your computer.

Download the Graphite Plug-in for Spotlight v1.0 (260k for Mac OS X 10.4 or later.)