I'm seeing this callout autofill issue with VW2018 Fundamentals as well, and I would very very much like it to be fixed. New callouts should always be made with blank text by default.

I suspected that might be the answer...that's been on our wishlist as long as batch print has been around. Thanks for looking into it.

I can use Export PDF... from the menu, but the Publish tool still only has "DWG/DXF" and "DWF" listed as my options under "Publish To:"

I was very excited to see this...but then I noticed that .pdf export doesn't seem to be extend into the Publish tool, which means it's still no better than the .pdf printer we already use. Is it possible that .pdf export will make into Publish as well? If so, that would probably be the #2 new feature for our (Windows-based, Fundamentals-using) firm besides multi-view, even though I'm about to send in a minor bug report for a graphical glitch I'm getting. P.S. I'm not going to agitate for a UI overhaul, but I do agree that the marketing team should hear that the "enhancements" shown in promotional material, if not available to the end user, are being taken as false advertising and are putting off clients.

Thanks, @JimW. It's not file-specific, so I'll run a dxdiag and e-mail tech support with a description (and link to this thread).

I haven't figured out how to toggle this off, and it's becoming quite an annoyance while trying to get some detailing done this morning. @JimW, is there anything I can do or send in which might be helpful in figuring out what's going on?

The multiple leader topic seems unrelated. That said, I tried it as an experiment and discovered something interesting - for supplemental added leader lines, the snap point becomes the (0,0) page origin. That definitely doesn't seem right. (5/25/2017 Update: When I use "Add Leader Line" today, it doesn't snap to anything, whether I hold down Shift or change my Snap to Angle settings. If I create more than one additional leader all at once, the first one doesn't snap at all and then each subsequent one snaps to the previously picked point. This is different and seems less wrong than snapping to the origin, but it still doesn't seem right.)

Just popped in to report that I've seen this issue from time to time, but that it comes and goes. I have never figured out what toggles the setting, but frustratingly, it seems to have toggled again this morning. It has occurred for me a few times even prior to VW2017, and it seems related to this report from 2014 which describes the same issue (or one very similar). As you can can see in the attached screenshots, my leader snap angles are now relative to the tip of the leader, not the shoulder point. #2 is what I get after detoggling the "Angles relative to prior segment" setting. If there's anything that can be done to reset this and prevent it from ever happening again, I'd love to know what it is. Thanks!

As an engineer, I only have small windows of time in any project where I'm only working in CAD. Many in our office keep VW open on one screen while simultaneously working in spreadsheets, analysis programs, etc. on the other screen. I'm having a hard time imagining scenarios where the other input options listed work well (or at all) for the array of programs we use all at once.

Chiming in to note that redraw lapses occur here all the time throughout our engineering office when our VRAM gets maxed out (we're primarily 2D users, but we do often have more than one memory-hungry program open at once). The most-common redraw issues I/we run into are with 1) editing text and groups/symbols inside of symbols and 2) all contents of the main VW window refusing to draw when the machine is really pushed - although navigation, snapping, and selection all work. My hardware below is pretty typical for our office at the moment. At our desktops, we're generally driving two mid-size monitors, with VW on one screen and something else running on the other...so yeah, we're probably a bit underspecced. Up-to-date video drivers seem to make a difference, although for some reason, updates only seem to solve the problem temporarily.

Strangely enough, I had not seen this in VW2016 until recently, but since a recent deployment (SP4 for some, fresh installs for others) it's now occurring on my machine and in machines throughout our office. The autofill is being created on a per-file basis (whether I start from a template or a blank file), not globally, so it doesn't appear to be something we could change via the .xml preference files. Another thing I've noticed which may be related is that the option in the Callout Preferences to "Apply Settings...All New Documents" no longer appears to work for new files opened from templates - just for blank files. I've resaved templates with adjusted default callout preferences to deal with the second issue, but the first one is quite a distraction. If that preferences is now saved within the VWX files now, please give us the option to turn it off. Thanks. UPDATE: It's the same issue as discussed here, except that for our files, whatever text is entered for the first callout in a file is what becomes the autofill default, even after a VW restart.

I know I'm late to the game here, but I just want to chime in and say I'm glad this conversation is happening. Our (structural) engineering office works almost exclusively in 2D, using the same set-up described by HEengineering and Donald Wardlaw above - Top/Plan Design Layers used for nearly everything, although we will go to Sheet Layers and Viewports for large projects where floor plans split across pages. (For the record, we do a bit of coordination work in Revit at a low/mid-LOD level when requested, but it doesn't get requested as often you might think...2D output with paper in mind is still our main mode of work.)

Thanks, Jim & Tim. It seems that the What's New brochure is as close as I'm going to get to a comprehensive feature matrix. As long as the tools we use intensively haven't been broken and stability is decent, that'll do for now. Time to start testing. By the way, I appreciate the migration manager...not having to recreate our customized workspace and only having to tweak a few settings options is great.

Jim, thanks for the list of new features at the top. From the New Features/Why Upgrade sections of the website, though, it doesn't look like there's much available for Fundamentals users...and the Why Upgrade site actually promotes a bunch of features which were new prior to 2016, even when I set my Current Version to 2015. For me to find out what's actually new for us, is there anything more detailed than the matrix in the back of the What's New brochure?

Since Nemetschek knows that the should-be-universal ability to create clean .pdf output is broken when VW's GDI+ implementation interfaces with other programs or the OS, is there any hope that they might provide the "real Export PDF" capability to Fundamentals users? To head off the anticipated response of "Buy our more expensive software," none of the Design Series options provide additional features which are useful to our engineering office aside from the printing capabilities. Because of this, it's a lot to ask that we pay to upgrade every seat just so that we can use GDI+ and still have plans which print/export correctly. (This has been a frustration of ours for some time, but I know that, as Windows-based Fundamentals users, we're small fries in the VW universe...) P.S. To clarify/update, Windows has no Print to PDF option, so it's not a direct OS thing. We've been using the pdfFactory software printers to create files, and the VW-to-pdfFactory file creation is where the problem occurs.