Viewport Philosophy

[ErichR]

Lots of us spend a significant amount of our lives strategically reusing our drawings so as not to continually reinvent the wheel, and to avoid repetition. CAD has been a great assist in this objective.

The use of viewports for detailing portions of a drawing, while helping to avoid repetitious drafting within a drawing file, seems to make it impossible to reuse the composited information (drawings and notations) in another project file. Am I missing something? To be able to capture everyting in a viewport, that is, to make it portable for reuse in a different file, would be extremely useful. Should this be a Wish List item?

[ 02-01-2005, 11:18 AM: Message edited by: ErichR ]

[BG]

This is one downside of adding information on the "annotation" layer of the viewport. It means this "drawing" or "detail" cannot be copied or re-used in another file.

BG

[eric.rktek]

Say you had all the appropriate reference files in a destination file 'B' matching those of source file 'A'. If you copied the viewport from file 'A', could it be made possible to do a paste in place and have it carry forward the crop, annotation, and layer/class info to file 'B'? Or at least have some kind of intelligence to know that it is supposed to have certain layers and classes shown even if they were not present in file "B'? When you came and reference the file in after the paste, they could show up in the viewport then.

That would be very useful, and possibly satisfy the request posted above.

[Guest]

The viewport is just that - a viewport. It's similar to a Layer Link, except that it does not create a second set of objects. It's simily referencing objects in the drawing.

If you'd like to use a viewport in another file, you need to reference the objects used to create the viewport such as those on a design layer.

[Jonathan Pickup]

i still find that you can reuse your details from project to project, but you have you set up your library parts in so that they are useful in viewports.

You could for example have annotation and dimnesions on a class in the symbol. Then you could place the detail in a section, yet still use it to make details with viewports.