Wall hatch different when XREF'd

[Anonymous]

My Wall hatch is appearing different when XREF'd into a separate file. We have standard wall styles setup with different hatches. Wall hatches appear the same in each file when originally created in that file, but when the same wall styles are XREF's into the file, the scale of the hatches becomes very small, making it appear solid when printed. I have attached 2 files, (Wall Test) that shows the wall styles and hatches properly, and (Wall Test XREF) that shows both the wall styles and hatches properly, these walls were created in the file, and the wall hatches that are not coming in properly, that have been XREF'd.

[David_W_Koch · Accepted solution]

@Anonymous 

Your Wall Test file has MEASUREMENT set to 1, so it will be pulling hatch patterns from the acadiso.pat file, with a spacing of 3.175 between lines for the ANSI31 pattern.  Your Wall Test XREF file has measurement set to 0, so it is pulling hatch patterns from the acad.pat file, with a spacing of 0.125 between lines for the ANSI31 pattern.

Your Wall Style overrides apply different scale factors to the ANSI31 pattern (2 and 50, respectively), which roughly compensates for the factor of 25.4 between the spacing values, for the live objects.  The objects in the externally referenced file still have the scale factor of 2, but will use the acad.pat file definition.

Best practice is to have the MEASUREMENT System Variable in all imperial-unit files set to 0.  Do that in Wall Test, then adjust the scale factor in the style-level display overrides from 2 to 50.  Then all will appear the same, Xref and "live".

[Anonymous]

Thanks, David, this solved my problem right away. You mention that Best practice is to have the MEASUREMENT System Variable in all imperial-unit files set to 0. is this true for metric projects as well. We have had similar issues in our metric templates.

[David_W_Koch]

Metric-unit files should have MEASUREMENT set to 1, so that acadiso.pat and acadiso.lin are referenced for hatches and linetypes, respectively.  The definitions in those files are based on the length unit being millimeters.

[Anonymous]

I created modified the color of the hatch in a file I'm using an XREF from white to blue. It appears correctly in the drawing file but when I XREF the file into the drawing the pattern reverts to white. Any suggestions on how to rectify this would be appreciated.

More correctly, I changed it from Bylayer to a hard color of Blue

[pendean]

On the LAYER palette is a cogwheel icon, click on it and explore the XREF settings and overrides options you may wish to change to get the results you want (image below is just for reference, not the options you should try) 

[Anonymous]

Dean, 

No luck with the setting but I'll stop chasing the issue for a while. 

Things of note:

if i copy the wall into the drawing with the XREF, the copied wall displays as I want. I expected that.

If I bind the XREF as an insert the wall will update and display the pattern as I want.

I even tried creating a layer A-Wall-Patt and assigning it to the hatch pattern for the wall. It didn't work either. I'm sure there's a sysvar someplace that I'm missing. C'est le vie