To Purge or Not To Purge

[oceanside]

I work for a municipality.  We use architectural standards in the office and have a dwt set up for our drawings (layers (AIA), fonts, sheets, dimension styles, etc.).  We are using Architecture 2011.  We need to pass some of our drawings to contractors to work on.  Before giving our drawing over to a contractor, is it good practice to purge our layers (which could be lots) or leave them alone and let them go with the drawing?  I'm thinking we should send the drawing with all our standard layers.  The contractor's will xref our drawing into theirs.   What's your feeling? 

[Anonymous]

most recipients want to receive simple, clean data which is easy and efficient to use.

referencing your data and bringing up the layer mangager which has lots of empty layers is unlikely to be seen as efficeint.

similary unreferenced regapps will not be seen as efficient

[omc-usnr]

One of the 1st things I do when recieving a dwg from an outside source is to purge unused content.

Purging before sending can also reduce dwg file size for transmission of the file.

Reid

[dgorsman]

The only reason I can see for not purging is if you expect them to make changes to the drawing while adhering to your standards.  Hopefully not, if the drawings are stamped and signed... Otherwise purge away - it will help those who XREF your drawings, as they won't have to page through the extra layers or look at unused text/dimstyles.  Ah, also BLOW AWAY UNUSED ANNOTATION SCALES SO THEY DON'T PROPAGATE.  You might not hear them yelling, but that tingling sensation at the back of your neck is all those evil thoughts we get when dealing with drawings that have 10 000+ scales.

[oceanside]

Excellent advice....thank you all so much.  Will definitely make sure this happens.

[JamesMaeding]

by the way, the Civil Batch Converter in LDT and C3D does a great job of purging drawings fast without opening them.

It essentailly wblocks the drawing contents to a new drawing in memory, so is about as good as you can do for cleaning.

And you can convert the version and explode custom C3D objects at the same time to boot.

Only issue is make sure the ucs is left as world in all drawings, and set bind xrefs to no.