I yowza-ed too soon. I thought updating my plotter driver would do the trick. nope.
Charles, you are on the right track with DRAWORDER, but there must be something more clever than what I have been doing.
yes, the lwpolylines represent actual circuits, and I really don't want to break my wires.
yes, the blocks are devices like smoke detectors, relays, speakers, etc. and within each block is a region outline at z = 10 (in a separate layer that I can freeze while I draw, and thaw when I plot.)
thought I was clever, I made a selection set of ALL the "circuits" and put them UNDER a device block, and thought I had done something when that seemed to work. but I have 1774 circuits and 1270 device blocks. I simply had not checked them all when I got happy too quickly.
this is my first exposure to the DRAWORDER command, and I am trying to figure out what it does, and how it does it.
the "move to the back" and "move to the front" did not seem to accomplish much in my case.
the "under" option was what has been working - a bit at a time.
does DRAWORDER work from entity handles?
if it does, I could get all the entity data for the circuits and devices, write-line them to file, erase them all, and entmake them in the order I like, so that the new handles are sequential, and the blocks are drawn after the circuits are drawn.
:ugly:
thanks
PS this file has been edited by others, many others, before it was given to me. some of the work was in ReVit, and was save back to Autocad. there are, therefore, plethora blocks that have only one insert - proxy objects that didn't translate any better than that. I mention this only because the file has so many names to manage that the layer pull down and the layer dialog boxes do not sort automatically. something else I had not seen before this job.