Unnecessary layers...
This is probably more of a vent, as I believe there is no perfect solution. At least what would be perfect in my mind.
Anyway, I hate having unused layers. I hate having to scroll through pages and pages of layers in the layer dialog box whenever I want to do something. It slows me down. I prefer to have my drawings "clean", and have layers that are only actually being used at the moment.
I could easily do this in Land Desktop by purging unused layers, but C3D will not allow this as so many layers are theoretically being 'used' by various styles even though they're not really being used.
Layer filters can help some, but only to a small degree. Does anybody else share my frustration in this area? If so, have you found any solutions?
Thanks.
Yes child styles would be a big help in this scenario, though it would still require a lot more management overhead. Alas even that isn't available for many objects, including surfaces.
Rick Jackson
Survey CAD Technician VI
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Can't seem to find a link for that white paper RL. Any chance you have one or a few choice words for Google?
John Mayo
Here you go John
Rick Jackson
Survey CAD Technician VI
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Rick Jackson
Survey CAD Technician VI
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@Anonymous wrote:Here you go John
I'll read this later this weekend. Looks interesting.
I've tried the Layer 0 thing before, and never really took to it. I mean, I can see some advantages, but for me the disadvantages were too many. I always feel like I lose too much flexibility. Layer control, IMO, was simple, straight forward, and most importantly "not broken". With the introduction of styles it became bloated. Sure some of the new ways or workarounds can be cool in their own right, and I use some of them, but they don't really provide the flexibility and simplicity that I'm looking for most of the time.
Maybe I should rephrase my original intent and question: How can I set up a layer filter that will filter out layers that are "used" (note the quote marks) but empty? In other words, layers that are assigned in a style, and hence show as being currently used, but in reality have nothing on them at the moment.
This is why we fixed our template. We use to have that fustration but we made the template work with layer 0 and we have full layer control for all C3D objects and every layer can be removed if not real drawing data exists. 😉
I don't know what other negatives there could be besides the time required to fix the template and it doesn't have to be done in one day.
John Mayo
It works for us. We don't ship triangles. We send an xml surface and contours for any surface. We try to avoid a situation where another company is rebuilding the surface we created for them.
The articles posted above tell you that this can all be set up with a hybrid of the methods so if you had a handfull of layers you wanted imbeded it is possible.
Now it is a lot of work to rebuild a template like this and this would be an issue for me as well. If this were the case you could consider doing it in small steps and slowly integrate the new template.
John Mayo