Viewport styles

[Neilw_05]

I've posted this idea to AUGI a couple of times but it never gained traction. Perhaps it is better suited for Civil work so I'll try it here.

In civil work we often need to create plans that require multiple layouts that share common viewport display settings. For example a roadway plan may have many plan and profile sheets with all the sheets displaying the same information but in different locations along the roadway. Since all these sheets need to have common viewport display settings (i.e. color, lineweight, layer on/off display, etc.) it can be a tedious process to synchronize all the layouts if a change in the viewports is made. Currently the process requires creating a saved layer state and then stepping through each sheet to apply the new settings.

My idea is to have what I call "viewport styles" where a layer state can be created and associated to viewports. Then whenever the layer state changes, all the viewports with that style assigned to them will update automatically.

I would think this would be useful in other disciplines as well but I couldn't find a generic Autocad Idea Station.

[Anonymous]

MATCH PROPERTIES <MA> on the viewports might speed things up a bit for you in the mean time. Might be faster than layer states.

[Neilw_05]

Does that work between layout tabs?

[Anonymous]

Not to my knowledge. You'd have to have multiple layouts on a tab. We do that for this very reason, when creating sheets that are just chunks of a larger piece. Road PnP sheets, for instance.

[Neilw_05]

Maybe you misunderstood the concept. P&P sheets can span many layout tabs in a single drawing. To synch the viewports on different tabs you'd need to use layers states. 

[Anonymous]

I understand what you are saying. 

What I am saying is that we have up to six "sheets" on a single layout, each with their own titleblock and viewports. When you have serveral sheets on one tab, you can match properties of the viewports. When we want to print, we window over the sheet we want, and print. If your PnP sheets are spread across serveral layouts, then yes, layer states are the way to go, as it is currently.

[Anonymous]

Here is an example. Multiple sheets on one layout tab. You can see we have several tabs of PnP sheets, each with multiple sheets on them. 

I know it's not a fix for your issue, but maybe it can help a little.

[Neilw_05]

I understand what you are doing now. That workflow doesn't allow you to use publish so I don't feel it is a good solution.

[jmartt]

I suppose you've thought of this, but you could copy/paste the VP you like into another paperspace and then match properties from there.

This isn't ideal, I suppose.

I was just playing around with this and if you make a view (_view command) you can save the layer state with the view. I then made a viewport and set it to that view, which at least gave me the layer state if not the viewport scale I was looking for (but you're going to be zooming to what you want in the viewport anyway). But then I wanted to see if this viewport with that particular layer state was reproducible so I dragged the viewport over to my tool palette...No dice. The viewport icon that's created doesn't run a command to draw a VP with that layer state. BUT! It envokes the _vports command, not the _-vports command, which allows you to specify a view at the creation of the viewport and it'll remember the layer state of that view. (It's weird that I can't, by typing an option, find that initial dialog box I see with _-vports when I use _vports.)

...Which doesn't work for plan production. But how could it, really, being from a template? I guess if there was an option to "make plan and profile sheets but make all the plan viewports with the same layer state as this one I pick"  ...I don't think that's reasonable. You could, I think, make the viewports in your template follow the layering system you want and as long as you were careful, or really set-up with style layers, you could just let the viewport in the template take care of the layer states. Like when we made lots of stuff on top of each other in LDD and let the VPs sort it out.

Regardless, if you want viewports with layers shown in a particular way more than once, you may want to set up views in your template that remember layer states. The views won't be looking where you want, probably, but the layers will be the way you want them.

[peterfunkautodesk]

This is a great idea, but the timing isn’t quite right for development consideration in the near term. As such, it is being put on the back burner to be re-visited at a later date. Please continue to comment and add your support.

Regards,

Peter Funk

Sr. Product Manager

Autodesk, Inc.

[DeeusJayus-ISX]

If you are working with only PnP Sheets in a single dwg, why not apply your layer overrides to your xrefs in Model space? We have similar issues but it seems that with VISRETAIN = 1, overriding xref properties in model space would prevent the need to have the viewport override consistency.

I'm curious, with the exception of overlapping annotation, what would you need to show/hide differently between PnP sheets?

[Neilw_05]

This applies to drawings that use the model space for multiple types of sheets. If there are only one type of sheet in a drawing then yes, just change the model space to update all the sheets.