Topic: Editing XREF's

[hyposmurf]

What would you do if an XREF you were issued had text in it that conflicted with the positioning of your some of your equipment?You could alter the position of the text(say room names) as its less important than your equipment,trouble is once its moved and your issued an updated XREF, the text has to all be repostioned!Ive run into this a few times and sometimes theres occasions where Im stumped as what to do,editing XREF's is meant to be a definate no go.

[M-dub]

Hmmm....
Just going to throw out an idea here (which will likely be thrown out for good after being read)

If it's a matter of having to figure out where the text is supposed to go AFTER the updated Xref is issued, would an *additional* note (under the text) placed on a layer called 'NoPlot' (see layer manager) be of any help?

I know it sounds kinda 'hokey-pokey' but I've done this on a number of occasions if there's a drawing with special requirements.  I'll add a "NOTE TO DRAFTSPERSON" type dealie.  That way, the CAD guy (or girl) will see the note and has no excuse for missing it, but the note will not show up on plots.

*Are you dizzy from rolling your eyes yet?*

I'm not sure...there's got to be a better idea than THAT!  Perhaps a LINE or LEADER on the NoPlot layer, pointing to the correct location of the text?

[yyou]

Only text from bkgd that we need here are room names.  We move them into our dwgs then turn off that layer.  After all layouts complete we turn on rmna layer then move them away from equipment.

[hyposmurf]

So there is someone elase who finds occasions when they have to edit XREF's .

[Bob Garner]

We frequently get XRefs from our subconsultants.  But since they're members of our design team, they're generally very good about modifying their XRefs for our convenience.  When our contracts people are smart, they include contract language that requires our subs to submit stuff to our requirements.

But sometimes, like you describe, you just have to make the modifications and repeat the prior modification when you get updates.  We always overlay recently received XRefs with previous ones to see what's changed and what old modifications we gotta do again.

Still beats paper drafting.

Bob G.

[Craig]

What we do in our XREF's, being room names are not the most important part of our drawings, we shade the text to where it's just visible on a plot and blueprint. If the contractor(s) really want to know the name of a room they need to look at the architects drawings

[sinc]

I think it's because of issues like this that Autocad seems to encourage people to put all their labels in paperspace.  They have valid reasons for this position, but I've found that modelspace labels are superior in some tasks.  It depends on what you're doing.

If you put labels in modelspace, I've found you can minimize conflicts if you try to set up your drawings so that as few labels as possible are in XREFd drawings.  If possible, try and keep all your base drawings "linework only".  When you must have labels in a base drawing, try to put labels with different purposes on different layers, if possible.  That way, in case of a conflict, you can always freeze just the offending layer in your main drawing, and it has less of an impact than if all the labels are on a single layer called "TEXT", or some such.