Template vs Resource Files

[OwenWhitehouse]

I'm not a C3D user, so bear with me, please. I manage a number of AutoCAD verticals, and they are all different in how they handle default and custom content. I'm working specifically with styles and layer settings, and I need some pointers.

With AutoCAD Architecture, I have set up a very bare-bones template. It has default layers and some other basic settings, along with a pre-configured layout tab. There are no styles in our template, since I yanked them all out. The reason I did that is simple...file size. We typically only use a few styles in any given drawing, so having ALL our custom styles, plus all the default ones in a template seems silly. When a user wants to insert an object, like a wall, for instance, he or she just clicks it on the palette, and it loads from the resource drawing file that contains all the styles we use. Nice and easy, and our file sizes are much smaller.

I'm not sure if this philosophy will work for C3D, and I'd like some input from the group. I noticed that C3D has a lot of Ribbon-based tools...would those be broken if the style they are targeting is gone from the drawing?

[Sinc]

Your default settings would be the key thing that would be broken.  Plus, working in C3D is really annoying if you constantly need to grab Styles from other drawings.

I'd say it works far better to just leave all your Styles in your template, and get your template well-configured.  Sure, this means all your drawings are huge - our template is over 1MB in size, with all the Point Styles and everything else.  But disk space is cheap these days, and attempting to jump through hoops to save 500KB/drawing just isn't worth it, in my opinion.

I wish it weren't like this...  I've long been an advocate for a more modern setup, where our model data and its representation are split up, similar to HTML and CSS for web pages.  That way, we could largely change the appearance of our drawings by flipping which Style Sheet was attached to the drawing.  This would make life far easier for people who must regularly work with a variety of Standards, and also means we wouldn't have to have all our Styles in every drawing.  But unfortunately, C3D wasn't designed that way.

[OwenWhitehouse]

Didn't think I'd ever get logged back in....darn 404 issue!

Thanks for the reply. I'm not too concerned about file size if the stuff needs to be there for C3D to work properly, as you say, storage is cheap. Since Architecture is heavily palette-based, bringing in content that way is no problem. If C3D needs to use pre-configured styles that already exist in the template, then I'll stick with that.

Is there a really good primer out there for customizing C3D? I'm definitely no rookie with AutoCAD, so the more advanced the better. Nothing makes me grit my teeth more than clicking repetitively through hundreds of menus and dialogs to make minor changes to layers and settings. I suppose I could click around on the AU site....any other recommendations?