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Clipit has been my Macro of choice when dealing with railing in front of other drawing components (windows, doors, etc.). I don't like using a hatch pattern like ansi31 because it doesn't look real and my clients like the look of actual railing. Now that I upgraded to DC15 I am trying new features and I have to say that Knockout is by far the most awesome yet.

Besides the advertised feature of text over the drawing, you can also apply knockouts to any object that has an "area" (Lines, Béziers & B-Splines are the only excluded entities that I have found so far). Based on this, I converted a "fancy" railing in a recent project to Polylines, turned on the Knockout for these objects, and viola... No need to Clipit and create a mass number of entities. And the best part is that the file is still easily editable so that i can remake the elevations without having to weld a bunch of lines back together.




As part of doing this experiment I have had to reorder my layers so that objects with Knockouts appear later in the layer list. I also turned off Plot Menu>Pen Sort and changed my Pen Tables so that Bitmaps and Fills print In order.

Yeah creating knockouts as a standard part of symbols and common drawing parts is pretty awesome. We are adding them to all kinds of stuff. Keynotes, Doors, Windows, All types of front/top level elevation entities like your railing, Lighting fixtures that clip out for reflected ceiling plans. It's pretty much endless how handy this feature is. Anyone on v13 or older or who hasn't taken a serious look at knockouts in v14 & 15 and found a way to implement them in their work is really missing out.

Yes, I thought I had posted about front porch rails a while ago.
It's great, you can see the elevation at the bldg, then turn on the Porch rail layer and get the street view.
And as Josh mentioned, adding a knockout layer to many symbols (as I need them) really helps. Add one to the Water Closet symbol so if you have a floor pattern, the symbol with knock that out when placed.
Grab Bar above a Water Closet that has a grab bar above, now doesn't have lines crossing.
etc. etc.
Go Blue this weekend.

Roger D wrote:Add one to the Water Closet symbol so if you have a floor pattern, the symbol with knock that out when placed.

This is a great suggestion that i never even thought of (I had done the Notation Symbols already). Thanks.