Best Practice for Displaying Groups of Similar Objects

[jchilen]

I am updating some landscaping architecture drawings that were first done in 1999. Where there were several trees in an area the drafter used a diamond note to point at one of them and an arcing line to connect similar trees together. I have never seen this method of grouping before. Is there a best practice for showing this grouping of similar object?  A sample of the drawing is attached.
I don’t know what features were available on Autocad back in the 90’s but this seems to have been done the hard way. The diamond note is a block but the leader line was hand drawn and the curves are all individual arcs. It’s easy enough to create a multileader object using the note block but substituting multiple leaders for the arcs makes the drawing look cluttered.
A sample of the drawing is attached. There are over 100 trees on this site and they are not all equidistant from each other. The drawing is being updated to show vegetation that was removed or added.

[Alfred.NESWADBA]

Hi,

>> I don’t know what features were available on Autocad back in the 90’s

AutoCAD never had such a feature.

This part of drawing seems to be created by an add-on, either you find the developer who created that or you might ask people to create that again for you (also >>>customization forum<<< might help here).

Good luck, - alfred -

[imadHabash]

Hi,

for such a case ... i suggest to make a key note that describe tree's status . 

Regards,

[jchilen]

I spent an afternoon digging around in Google and looking at various landscape architecture sites.  It seems that this grouping method is not some sort of standard per se, but it might well have been the in-house standard for the architect's firm.  This actually seems to have been a prevalent style back when drawings were done by hand and it probably saved a lot of time.

[Kent1Cooper · Accepted solution]

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@jchilen wrote:

.... and an arcing line to connect similar trees together. ....

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I couldn't say what the industry standard designation for that kind of thing is, but there are routines around that will do that kind of continuous linking of Block insertion points with Arcs, such as >this<.  Look at the other offerings and variants on that same thread, and do some Searching for wording involving Blocks and Arcs for other threads with similar routines.