Drawing Legends/Keys

[Crass]

I hate making keys and legends, but they are critical to understanding drawings, especially those with a lot of overlayed hatched areas.

I like to make them in paper space so that I can easily customize them to the sheet and to what hatched items are displayed in that specific sheet. But, I then find it to be such a pain to replicate the hatches from model space accurately, especially when these features are in an XREF, or the ucs has been rotated, the scale changed, or there are viewport LWT, LTYPE, and color overrides.

Does anyone know of a better strategy for this? I would love some suggestions.

It would be simple and amazing if the hatch "inherit properties" worked across Model Space / Paper Space / XREF scenarios but it doesn't seem to.

[BadandMadMartin]

Because I mainly work with record drawings, I just create a wblock for each type of legend layout (eg. power, fire, etc), and just insert the relevant block to the required layout, with its own new layer frozen in all layouts (eg. "Legend Fire, Legend Power, etc), then just enter model space of the appropriate layout and unfreeze the layer and insert the wblock.

Hope this helps.

[pendean]

Another Option: put your legend/keys in modelspace with your drawings. Viewports can be resized to fit most rectangular shapes needed on a sheet (you do know you can have up to 64 viewports in a layout, right? and they don't all have to be statice and look at only one area of modelspace, right?), and if you are doing more complex shapes I think you may be losing that professional look you appear to be striving for... .

[Crass]

Dean,

You are right. That is how I typically do it. However, I guess what is making this more complex is that so many of these hatched areas are in xrefs. It becomes such a pain to turn these on and off, move them, sync scale and angle, and organize them through different xrefs. Different scaled sheets adds an extra level of obnoxiousness to this process. I end up making a bunch of specific layers just for keys, for different sheets at different scales... and when something changes in an xref its a pain to update all of these.

Anyway, thanks for any tips. I realize this is more a drawing strategy / organization issue I need to wrestle with. 

[jhjirak · Accepted solution]

you could use viewports to capture hatch paterns of your x-refs.  So if you have 10 different hatch patterns, then you have 10 different viewports in your paper space legend.  So then when you change your x-ref it updates the legend. 

[Crass]

Genius. Maybe this what pendean and others were saying initially, but that when explained that way it made total sense to me.

A follow up problem I am having is that for some reason, I cannot get these "hatch swatches," made with viewports as you recommended to sit on top of my wipeout (see image below). I have used "Draw Order : Move to Front" and "Draw Order : Bring Above Objects" commands multiple times and the Legend hatches are still being blocked by my wipeout box. I assume the reason the two lowest swatches (green and blue) are saying on top is because they are hatches created in Paper Space rather than through this viewport method. I don't understand why this would matter though. 

[Crass]

In essense, I am unable to stack a viewport on a wipeout on a viewport.

Maybe this is not even possible? http://www.cadtutor.net/forum/showthread.php?32622-Having-a-viewport-on-top-of-a-Wipeout-area

[jhjirak]

Don't know what to tell ya.  there is probably 10 different ways to do a legend but some may take longer than others. viewports can be tricky especially with wipeouts.  I don't use wipeouts that much, only when I absolutely need them. 

[Crass]

I also typically try to avoid using wipeouts but this seems like a useful situation. To deal with this issue, I instead changed my main viewport to a polygonal viewports with the VPCLIP command so that it no longer sits under the legend hatch viewports.

All in all, I like this method. I would be curious to see other ones just for comparison.

Thanks again!

[jhjirak]

most of my drawings have the same hatch patterns.  So I create a block with everytihg pre-made.  Then, I just insert this block into paper space in the corner (where it fits).  My hatchs never change (concrete, gravel, shading etc).  So once I have my block of my legend im done.