Leader troubles: text inside block (circle or hex) showing up on different layer

[Anonymous]

Hi,

I will give a quick background so you can understand where I am coming from. Skip the next paragraph if you don't want the background. 🙂

I am transitioning from doing hand drawn, scale drawings in the field for my father-in-law when he has had a remodel or an addition job. I would draw the as is and he would then create the plans to submit. He is old school, using paper, vellum, and a blueprint machine. I am currently a drafting student and applying what I am learning with my work both by taking my laptop cart into the field for the existing houses and also drawing new houses from scratch in AutoCAD. I am currently working on a new house job and trying to set up a template from scratch.

I am currently trying to set up layer states and I am having a problem with leaders. I am using circle and hexagon "leaders" (without the lines and arrows) with letters and numbers inside them to refer to my door and window schedules. The problem is that the shapes show up on the active layer (A-DOOR-ANNO-LVL1 for the Hexagons and A-GLAZ-ANNO-LVL1 FOR THE CIRCLES) when I insert the leader, but the the text is invisible when I am using my floor Level 1 floor plan layer state.

Some experimentation revealed the following facts:

1) If I turn on all of the layers, the numbers would sow up. I therefore started turning on the layers a few at a time to determine what layer they were visible on.

2) I found that the text inside my circle layers would show up on my foundation footings layer and the text inside the hexagons shows up on an old "text" layer that I may or may not have deleted when I set up my layers with proper layer names.

3) If I switch to my foundation layer state, then the numbers from the circles (but not the circles) show up, but if I select them, it shows that they are on the A-GLAZ-ANNO-LVL1, which is not turned on in the foundation layer state. The letters in the hexagons don't show up in any of the layer states (except for my "all on" layer state) , because I don't have the "text" layer on in any of them.

I have tried recreating the leaders both by creating a new one based on one of my text leaders (which works fine) and based on the "standard" leader which I have never used or modified. The new leaders work exactly as described above.

I also tried updating AutoCAD (I am using 2019, by the way). That didn't help so I installed 2018, updated it, and tried that with no success.

The only good thing is that when I go into a layout and apply my LVL1-FLOOR layer state (the same one I have been drawing the 1st floor plan in) everything shows up properly so I should be able to plot the project properly when I am finished with it, but it is a pain when I am creating the model.

I am beyond frustrated. Can anybody help?

Ryan

[Anonymous]

After sleeping on it , I came up with a work around. I will walk you through what I did with one of the sets of layers:

Selected all of the hexagons on the a-door-anno-lvl1 layer and moved  them to the s-fndn-ftng laye, which is where the letters were showing up. Then I switched to the Foundation layer state and verified that the letters were now displaying inside the hexagons properly. They were. Next I tied to delete the a-door-anno-lvl1 layer but, even though there were now no objects in it so I renamed it "undeletable." Then I renamed the s-fndn-ftng layer to a-door-anno-lvl1 and turned that layer on in my lvl1 floor plan layer state. Then I created a new s-fndn-ftng layer, added it to my foundation layer state and moved my footing to it. Now everything seems to be working as expected. I then followed these basic steps and fixed the circle leaders.

BTW, last night, I tried to move the leaders to different layers, but couldn't get the letters to move off of the foundation layer state.

So I guess my problem is solved for now, but this seems like a bug to me. Can someone tell me how I can submit this to Autodesk?

Thanks,

Ryan

[Anonymous]

OK, I spoke too soon. I went to my level 2 floor plan layer state and I added a hex leader. The hex showed up on level 2 correctly, but the text inside now shows up on my level 1 floor plan, visible when my a-door-anno-lvl1 layer is on and invisible when I turn it off (even though, once again, if I click on the disembodied letter, it says it is NOT on the a-door-anno-lvl1 layer).

[gotphish001]

Is the hexagon leader a block? Did you change the layer in the block? Layer set to byBlock?

Is the problem in an x-ref? VISRETRAIN variable changing what you are changing back? 

[Anonymous]

@gotphish001, Thanks for your reply.

The leader is neither a block, nor an xref.

I only used the word block because when you set up a leader, under the content tab, you select either "mtext" or "block." then when you select "block," you can select either a circle, or a hexagon, or other shapes. It this instance, I have set up both circle and hexagon leaders.

Also, it is very weird because the text that shows up when, for example, my footings layer was visible, wasn't actually on the footings layer. if I clicked on it, it showed that it was on my door anno layer. But it didn't show up on my door anno layer.

I checked and I can't get Layer Styles to work correctly in my layouts either. therefore, I have given up on using the layer styles for now and unstacked and moved my floors and foundation, etc... apart and will finish the project this way. I suspect that my problem is because I have been building on the same template this whole semester. It started out as a 2013 compatible file, because we use 2016 at school. Then when I bought my seat of LT, I brought it in and it got saved as a 2016 compatible file because I installed 2018. Then I upgraded to 2019. Along the way, I have possibly converted my file back to a 2013 ile to show something to my instructor and... whatever.

I should have started from a blank slate but I didn't want to re-set up all of the styles that I had already created. I just deleted all of the work from my last project and saved the file with a new name and then started setting up layers and layer styles and this is what I ended up with. I had layers that I can't delete even thought they were empty and I thought that I would just rename them with my new naming convention and use them. I suspect that my footings layer is one of those. But who knows.

Well, anyway, sorry about the ramble. And thanks again.

[john.vellek]

Hi @Anonymous,

Can you share a sample file withe the leaders as well as the layer states?

I am not sure why you are using leaders in the first place when you should more likely define a block for each unique tag that you want to use.

Please select the Accept as Solution button if my post solves your issue or answers your question.