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Dashed line symbols

PostPosted: Fri Jan 29, 2021 11:18 am
by David Porter
I discovered something that I didn't think we could do and wonder how long we have had this trick. I inserted an unexploded dashed line symbol. For giggles, I then changed the line spacing on the unexploded symbol. And, voila, the line spacing changed. I had always thought that we had to insert exploded symbols to manipulate the lines of the symbol? Have we always had the ability to change the line spacing of an unexploded symbol?

I did find that this only works with symbols that already have dashed lines. If an unexploded symbol has solid lines, it cannot be changed to dashed lines, regardless of the line spacing.

Re: Dashed line symbols

PostPosted: Fri Jan 29, 2021 8:08 pm
by joshhuggins
Yeah it works well. I only figured it out a couple of years ago myself. I have went back and changed a bunch of my symbols to have line work set with dashed lines and the spacing scaled down so when I insert them at a scale of 1, they look solid, but then if I need a dashed version, I can just change the linetype spacing factor of the symbol and poof it's dashed! No need to explode or have a second version of the symbol cluttering up the symbol browser.

In a similar fashion with the new Symbol Layer Manager we can also toggle symbol layers on/off to have different versions of the same symbol in a single symbol package. Really been doing a lot of cleaning out of my symbol library which makes finding what I want faster and makes the symbols display bigger in the symbol browser so snapping to specific insertion points on the symbols is much easier.

Re: Dashed line symbols

PostPosted: Thu Feb 04, 2021 11:45 am
by artmanvt2000
This is genius. I may have to do your trick Josh.