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#73376 by Neil Blanchard
Thu Mar 08, 2018 12:09 pm
Hi Folks,

Next Wednesday (March 14th), we are hosting DBUG at Signature Architects, and I want to present the new layer control in symbols. If you have symbols that you are using with this new feature - and if you can send them to me, I would like to use them to show how it can be used.

Thanks in advance.
#73378 by joshhuggins
Thu Mar 08, 2018 2:03 pm
I don't have many (yet) but will try to put a small pack together for ya.

One big way to use them I have come across is for knockouts. Before when adding a knockout to a symbol it was kind of an all or nothing thing. So we would add the knockout to the symbol, usually on it's own layer named 'Knockouts" so the knockouts were all on the same layer and easy to manipulate physically and then control their display order. But when we would place these symbols in the drawing the knockout was always there. If there were places on the drawing where we wanted to use that symbol without the knockout we would have to explode the symbol which is usually not ideal. Now using the Per Instance Symbol Layer Control, we can toggle off the knockouts layer as needed and only for the locations where it's needed. Now with this granularity it makes sense for most symbols to have a knockout layer where before you had to kind of make sure that a knockout would be useful most of the time or it would be more work removing it all the time.

Second big thing for us is creating a halftone layer in symbols where a halftone version of the symbols contents lives. We can now easily toggle on the halftone layer and the other layers off to get a half-toned symbol and not have to explode the symbol into dumb entities and manually recolor them.

Third thing that I have thought about but haven't actually done yet is for just different versions of a symbol, say like 4', 6' bookcases to create pseudo dynamic symbols à la Autocad's dynamic blocks. Have to kind of think through how this would work in practice & where it would actually make sense to do vs just being "cool" and also how it would affect our symbol library organization structure.

Or toggling something on/off in a typical detail where only one small part might change but everything else in the symbol remains the same so you don't have to keep a larger than necessary symbol library.
Last edited by joshhuggins on Fri Mar 09, 2018 11:47 am, edited 1 time in total.
#73416 by Neil Blanchard
Tue Mar 13, 2018 10:24 am
Question about a Miscellaneous Enhancements - number 7: "DataCAD will now save the Active layer upon Symbol's creation." What is this referring to?

Also, number 16: "{Ctrl}+[Enter} may now be used with DataCAD's input line." What is this referring to?
#73417 by David A. Giesselman
Tue Mar 13, 2018 11:21 am
Neil Blanchard wrote:Question about a Miscellaneous Enhancements - number 7: "DataCAD will now save the Active layer upon Symbol's creation." What is this referring to?

Previously when creating a multi-layer Symbol, DataCAD would always make the first layer the Active layer in the symbol. Now DataCAD will maintain the Active layer when the symbol is created.

Neil then wrote:Also, number 16: "{Ctrl}+[Enter} may now be used with DataCAD's input line." What is this referring to?

This was a wishlist item that [Ctrl]+[Enter] would be synonymous to the [Enter] key alone when DataCAD is prompting for input.

Dave

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