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, Béziers & 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.
Besides the advertised feature of text over the drawing, you can also apply knockouts to any object that has an "area" (Lines, Béziers & 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.
Wade Wylie
DataCAD v 21 (SE)
DataCAD v 21 (SE)