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Drawing labels refusing to be renumbered


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This is a problem I regularly have, using automatic drawing co-ordination.

I have a sheet with, say, 3 drawings on it. All is fine - the drawings are automatically labelled 1,2 and 3.

But then I want to add an extra drawing, between 1 and 2. So I want to renumber drawing "2" as "3", and "3" as "4", and then add in a new drawing "2".

It might let me renumber "3" as "4". But then when I try and renumber "2" as "3" I get an error message saying "That number is already used by a drawing on this sheet".

And I can't find a way to resolve this. I've tried deleting all the labels on that sheet, and re-applying them but the problem remains.

The only way I can get it to work is to create a completely new sheet, and then copy&paste the viewports back in, individually, in sequence, with new labels attached. This wastes quite a lot of time.

Is there something I'm missing here?

I'm on VW2011.

Edited by col37400
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The behaviour the OP describes only happens when auto drawing coordination is turned on. The "original" number assigned to the drawing label on creation (with auto drawing coordination ticked) seems to "stick", and renumbering your drawing labels (without creating duplicate drawing label numbers) doesn't seem to work IF you renumber the label to a number that was previously used by any of the other labels on the sheet (even they they have been renumbered).

Have I confused? :)

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

I wasn't able to replicate the issue in 2011 or 2012 either actually, which leads me to believe I have the steps wrong. Here is a step by step I used in a new blank file to test this in Vectorworks 2011 SP5:

1) Verified in File > Document Settings > Document Preferences > Display that "Use automatic drawing coordination" was enabled.

2) Drew 3 circles and made a viewport of them on a new sheet layer.

3) Edited the annotations of the viewport and added a drawing label.

4) Duplicate the viewport 3 times to give me a total of 4, the drawing labels all automatically updating themselves to number 1 through 4.

5) I edited the annotations of viewport 3 and selected the drawing label, changing the number to 5.

6) I then attempt to edit viewport 4 and change its drawing labels drawing number to 3, this works and I do not see any error messages.

Am I looking at completely the wrong thing? If not, if you both try the same steps in a new blank file, do you get the same results or do you get an error?

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Thanks JimW and no, you're not looking at the wrong thing.

I did the same as you describe in a new file and everything worked fine.

I use a custom sheet border and titleblock so tried again, using these, but again there were no problems.

So I don't know why it seems to be a problem in the file I'm currently working on. But I've had the same issue in other drawing files too.

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This may not be the case for you, but I use a template where the drawing labels are in a "nonprint" class, which I change to "none" when the labels are needed. Sometimes if that class is turned off I forget the labels are there. Auto-numbering, however, does not forget they are there. Having said that, from the specifics provided it does seem like you are experiencing some kind of file corruption.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Please do! The main problem is that often a Layer Import can get you away from document-specific issues, but Sheet Layer info doesn't get brought over when you perform an import, which is predominantly where drawing labels reside.

Rebuilding a file manually is... no fun.

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It was an issue annoying enough for me to use worksheets as a way of controlling sheet data, which I seem to prefer now.

Be really nice if a worksheet would auto update (a drawback to using worksheets to control sheet data, if you forget to update, the changes are not executed)

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When I start a new project I tend to re-use a file from a previous one, deleting the project-specific info but retaining the basic layer/class set-up etc. It's a lazy alternative to setting up a fresh template file.

So this issue could be related to a problem in the drawing file that gets copied over each time. Thinking about it, the drawing file I'm currently using would have originated when I was using VW2008.

It's not really an option to rebuild the current file. But I suppose I should think about making a template from scratch for future projects.

Any suggestions about how to fix it in my current file would be welcome though.

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  • 1 month later...

I think I might have worked out how to fix this, at least in some situations.

It seems that if you have several viewports on a sheet, even if some of them don't have a drawing number label, VW has assigned them a number anyway. So, say you have 6 viewports, and you have one labelled "1" but no labels attached to the others.

You are then trying to label one of the others "2" but VW is telling you that number's already in use.

I think this is because it thinks one of the un-labelled viewports is no. 2. It may also think that all the other viewports have a number as well.

So I think you can sort it out like this -

apply high-number labels to all those viewports...say, number them 10,11,12,13 and 14. Now they have a label sequence that doesn't cause VW conflicts, and the number 2,3,4,5 and 6 slots are free.

I *think* it generally then works to go back and re-number those viewports with the sequence you want.

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