Mark Bell wrote:3. Further develop the 'intelligence" of the smart doors/windows to include the ability to display more detail the closer you zoom in to a drawing. This may include mapping selected presaved views of door and window sections so that:
a) at scales 1:200 and larger only a simple rectangle is displayed,
b) at scales between 1:50 - under 1:200, a basic door or window profile is shown,
c) at scales 1:25 to 1:1, the actual manufacturer profile can be displayed,
In each situation, the user would presave selected scales to each door or window profile so that when a drawing is displayed at the various scales, the relevant level of detail is also displayed. I imagine it could be achieved in a similar way to how the smart symbols have been created only that users have the ability to assign a presaved symbol/linework to different scales as part of the smart door/window entities? It would allow us to use DataCAD into construction documentation using the smart parametrics used in the concept drawings rather than converting to 2D linework.
This ultimately should be linked to the scales and probably done with the symbols existing symbol min/max scales found in the symbol editors layer editor, not GTV's I think to make sure things stay set accordingly and to limit having to babysit symbols/smart entities via GTV's. With that said, this is another shining area where the scale file REALLY needs to be expanded to allow this type of control over the range of scales.
Mark Bell wrote:4. The above can also be adopted with smart symbols, ie. landscaping: at larger scales a tree can be shown as a simple circle with crosshair for the trunk, at intermediate scales, tree symbols with more detail, at smaller scales, detailed symbols of trees can be displayed. This ability to pre-assign scales to entities to allow varying levels of detail to be shown, once set up, would allow a lot of flexibility in how a drawing is structured.
This is exactly what the symbol min/max scale settings allow you to do now. Open a symbol in the symbol editor, open the layer manager. So you can create a symbol with a layer called '
Low Detail' which could have the entities draw as you would want them to be for the range of say 1:10 to 1:1000 scale. Then you set the scale range accordingly for that layer using the drop downs. So whenever the plot scale in the main drawing's plot scale is within that range, it will display that layer. Then you would create a layer for '
Med Detail' and could set that layers scale range say from 1/4"-1/16" (sorry, metric right?). So when the drawings plot scale is with that range, it will display the layers set to use that corresponding plot scale range.
The problem with this setup is that it's not really setting the symbol to display the symbol layers using the scale values in the drop downs, it's using the scale list's scale position. So say you set a symbol layer to display a layer at a certain scale range, say you set the min scale to 1/4" which is at scale list position scale position F3 and set the Max to 1/16" which is at scale list position F6. If you need to make any changes to your scale file later, say you need to add 3/32" because it doesn't exist currently in your scale file, so you pick the lowest scale in your position list to overwrite, it would push the scale list down pushing 1/16" into scale list position F7 since 3/32" is between 1/4" & 1/16", and since your symbol is set to only display the layers when using one of the scales between F3-F6, it will no longer show the layers at 1/16" scale since 1/16" is now in position F7. Hope this makes sense. It's kind of hard to explain without visual keys. This is probably my biggest wish for Datacad, that the scale file could get expanded enough so we don't have to worry about scale positions changing. You can already see how powerful this feature could be, but as it is now, it's unused able for us because we use such a range of scales we can't rely on a single scale file. I said I would stop harping on this topic because it must be much harder to program than just allowing more lines in the .SCL files, buuuut since you kind of brought it up, I thought I'd squeak a bit more and see if I could get some others to squeak with me. If Datacad is going to have a future with it's 2D&3D smarts which we know will have to be scale aware, I can't see things getting much further without addressing this key issue.