DWG TrueView Legacy Viewports Issue

[r.robert.bell]

No response required, this is for Autodesk Feedback.

Viewports created by AutoCAD 2007 and older do not "know" about annotation scaling. Understandable.

However, ever since 2008, AutoCAD automatically assigns an annotation scale of 1:1 regardless of the viewport's display scale. This always bugged me when the viewport was assigned a standard scale.

For many AutoCAD drawings it is probably not a huge issue. But for legacy ABS drawings it is a killer. ABS devices "know" about annotation scaling the moment they are upgraded by opening the legacy drawing in a newer version or AutoCAD. Opening a legacy ABS drawing will result in viewports where it appears that the devices have disappeared. They didn't vanish, they are being viewed in a viewport that scales at 1/8"=1'-0" but the devices are displaying at 1:1. In other words, they are really tiny.

In AutoCAD MEP I can detect this situation and correct the issue with the APIs. However, many of our engineers only use DWG TrueView. There is no API solution. This means our engineers cannot open a legacy drawing and view it ("no" devices), plot it ("no" devices), or eTransmit it ("no" devices).

Why isn't the default behavior for viewport upgrades to determine if there is a standard scale, and if found, assign the matching annotation scale? In the case of a custom scale, determine the closest coarser annotation scale and assign that, e.g. a viewport that is at 0.002 the closest coarser annotation scale would be 1/32" = 1'-0" (CAnnoScaleValue=0.00260417). The idea behind choosing the new coarser scale is that I'd rather have symbols a bit smaller to avoid potential clipping along viewport borders.