Drafting Aid

[ccad2509]

When drawing circuits keeping consistently by placing components in the horizontal/vertical plane across multiple pages can have the effect of making the drawings look untidy i.e on one page you may start your 3 phase lines 20mm from the top of the page and on another page it might be 18mm and on another 25mm

So you end up with messy looking drawings

Below is method of driving constantly in the way a drawing looks (shamelessly borrowed from another product)

A series of construction lines which are feint and dashed in colour which do not print on the hardcopy

(in this example i have used magenta so you can see the concept)

These lines are not just dumb lines in the page set up there would be a section for construction lines it would reference from either the format referencing point or from the ucs and you just add a series of values in the example below it would be 190,78,80,92,70,20,20,20

These lines cannot be moved or deleted

You could possibly define the line type and as with the settings you can have page settings and project versions

Needless to say if you did not want to use this function then there would be a tick box to enable/disable

You can then have settings for a 3 phase distribution / single phase dist/ 24vdc dist/PLC cards/vsds/ etc etc

This way your drawings will always have a constant look and feel

[rhesusminus]

Hi.

We have customers that already have this.

We just created a layer in the template that has "Plot: Off", "Transparancy: 90", "Locked: Yes".

If you don't want it, just freeze the layer.

If you need multiple "templates", just create more layers and freeze/thaw them.

A good way to see if the documentation is good, is by creating a PDF of it, and scroll through the pages. If stuff "jumps up, down and sideways" you've got a job to do 😉

[Anonymous]

I was thinking the same thing Brad mentions, but I can also see the value of having this as a project level setup of sorts.  Interesting idea.

I have something similar for our panel layout drawing templates where i have three different sets of centerlines to be used for various drawing types.  (Component Layout, Auxilliary Panels and Terminal Layout)

[ccad2509]

yes brad has a good solution

my thinking is if you compile a project from various other projects  then the symbol spacings could be set differently and using the apply project default button would reset the lines to what you want them to be as i said its in a another product and i found it quite a useful tool especially if your under pressure to crash out design

[Icemanau]

I use the snap to get the same start point on each dwg.

I come down between 15-20mm from the top of our dwg block and start at the first snap point available when using a 10mm snap setting.

As all the dwgs I start use the same template, this means that the snap is always in the same position.

After PDF'ing the dwgs, and flicking through I haven't noticed any changes in the position of the first line.

Regards Brad.

[t_chaws]

 Hi, 

Thank you for your idea!

We have added your suggestion to our research bucket; we will be looking into it for our future releases! Thank you again!

Keep posting new ideas!

Best Regards, 
AutoCAD Electrical Team