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Datacad associated hatching behaving like Autocrap

PostPosted: Wed Sep 28, 2016 12:24 pm
by Nick Pyner
I have been having serious grief with my hatches. On a current job, they have been taking forever to refresh, forever to plot, and the resulting PDFs are humungous. For all that, some of them are fine.

The plots are made up of eight little GTVs per page. The pages and indeed the GTVs all look much the same and have virtually the same content, but the PDF of one sheet plots fine and is 27k which is pretty normal for this kind of work. The next sheet is 2.5 Meg and doesn't look any different. The computer is groaning under the strain of displaying them, and there is a prompt under the save as telling me what's going on that I'm sure I have never seen before and have certainly never cared about.

Each hatch layer only has three or four entities on it, and everything looks Kosher, including all the layer counts, and the hatches are all plain-vanilla Ansi 31 @ 200. I'm not sure, but I believe there was one layer of three hatches where one was OK.

I have pretty well fixed things by making new hatches using the dodgy stuff as contours, but I would really like to know how I got into this mess in the first place.

Re: Datacad associated hatching behaving like Autocrap

PostPosted: Thu Sep 29, 2016 3:39 am
by REX PEET
I use the Bullzip pdf print utility in association with batch plotting. Never had any problems with hatches or anything else. 20 x A3 sheets comes to about 9MB. I also use PDfill to "glue" the sheets together into one file.

Re: Datacad associated hatching behaving like Autocrap

PostPosted: Thu Sep 29, 2016 7:35 am
by Neil Blanchard
Hi Nick,

That sounds more like nested XRef's, than hatches. If you are not using nested XRef's, try turning them off and see if that speeds things up.

Re: Datacad associated hatching behaving like Autocrap

PostPosted: Thu Sep 29, 2016 9:02 am
by Paul Nida
We have been having problems with hatches slowing down also, and the drawings don't have to have xrefs of any kind, although xrefs do slow down the drawings as well. Some hatches are worse than others, gravel being one of the worst. This seems to have been getting worse with every new version of DataCAD.

Re: Datacad associated hatching behaving like Autocrap

PostPosted: Thu Sep 29, 2016 10:36 am
by Nick Pyner
No. No XRefs and the hatches are just ANSI 31 @200, like I always use and never have any trouble. Further, while this job is MSP, the total area of hatch on the page is much the same as my usual stuff. I could see the hatches winding out in the plot preview and I could tell which were the offending ones. I had good hatch and bad hatch adjacent in the same GTV. I had to wait about twenty seconds to save to PDF.

I have never had this in DCad before, although I have had it with ACad.

Re: Datacad associated hatching behaving like Autocrap

PostPosted: Thu Sep 29, 2016 11:42 am
by joshhuggins
Complete shot in the dark here, but is View Dependency checked under the View menu?

Re: Datacad associated hatching behaving like Autocrap

PostPosted: Thu Sep 29, 2016 1:07 pm
by Roger D
Check linetype and spacing?
Years ago, slower machines and video cards, I found even having Solid lines at 1 displayed a lot slower than spacing of say 5000.

Re: Datacad associated hatching behaving like Autocrap

PostPosted: Thu Sep 29, 2016 1:09 pm
by Neil Blanchard
The only time that hatch made any discernible difference in my experience, is the Gravel pattern that is incredibly complicated and very dense. It has 417 line segments in the pattern - not ONE like ANSI 31 has.

Re: Datacad associated hatching behaving like Autocrap

PostPosted: Sat Oct 01, 2016 11:28 pm
by Nick Pyner
I don't actually use it, but view dependency is on. The hatch was solid linetype ansi 31 spacing is 1. I'm still at a los and I believe I have saved a good file when I thought I had saved a bloated one.

Re: Datacad associated hatching behaving like Autocrap

PostPosted: Sat Oct 01, 2016 11:49 pm
by joshhuggins
Nick Pyner wrote:I don't actually use it, but view dependency is on.
Since you are not using it, you'll get a decent speed increase if you turn it off.

Re: Datacad associated hatching behaving like Autocrap

PostPosted: Sun Oct 09, 2016 10:46 am
by Nick Pyner
You are dead right about that!

NP

Re: Datacad associated hatching behaving like Autocrap

PostPosted: Sun Oct 09, 2016 11:00 am
by Roger D
Nick Pyner wrote:The hatch was solid linetype ansi 31 spacing is 1.

Did you try changing the line spacing to a large number like 5000?

Re: Datacad associated hatching behaving like Autocrap

PostPosted: Wed Oct 26, 2016 1:01 pm
by dmartens
OK since I couldn't find anything in the manual I have to ask. What is view dependency?

Dan

Re: Datacad associated hatching behaving like Autocrap

PostPosted: Wed Oct 26, 2016 1:21 pm
by Roger D
I find reviewing (doing a find on terms) in the RevHistory file at time more usefull for newer features. Also the "What's New" both found in the Help menu button.

View-dependent symbol layers
DataCAD has the ability to assign view dependency to layers inside symbols. A symbol
may contain layers which display information only in the 2D (plan) view, layers which
display information only in 3D (elevation, isometric, perspective and axonometric) views, or
layers which display information in both.

Re: Datacad associated hatching behaving like Autocrap

PostPosted: Wed Oct 26, 2016 2:33 pm
by dmartens
Thanks Roger. Haven't ventured into that aspect of symbols yet but good to know.