Layers in Paperspace

[Paul Sweet]

Over the holidays things were pretty quiet in the office, so I made the mistake of trying to teach myself paperspace. I read the tutorial on this site, as well as several of Lynn Allen's articles. The plans for our building are all in one file, and I was eventually able to create a separate layout for each floor plan, with the titleblock in paperspace and the plans in modelspace. I figured out how to freeze & thaw layers so each layout would show only one floor.

I'm puzzled because the titleblock I copied (from another drawing) into the layouts in paperspace doesn't behave like a layer in modelspace. When I go into modelspace and turn on only the titleblock layer, I'm greeted with a blank screen. If I modify a titleblock in one layout, the changes don't appear in other layouts, so I have to change each layout individually, which gets tedious and defeats a main purpose of layers.

Did I do something wrong, or do layers (mis)behave differently in paperspace? Also, do layers in paperspace exist only in paperspace, and not also in modelspace?

One possibility I'm considering is to make the viewport the full size of the sheet, so the titleblock would also be in modelspace, then I would use layouts to freeze & thaw different layers for each floor plan. However, this wouldn't allow me to take full advantage of paperspace (which I'm obviously not quite ready for yet!) and multiple viewports on one sheet.

[Flores]

A layer can have entities on both paper & model space; however whatever is drawn in model space only exists in model space and whatever is drawn on a layout only exists in paper space. Think of the viewport in paper space as a "window" that looks into model space. You can LOOK through the window, but whatever you see through this "window" only "exists" in model space. If you delete a viewport, it doesn't delete everything you have drawn, only the "window" to see into model space.
Layers and title blocks are 2 different things. A "main purpose of layers" is not to update title blocks. Probably what your looking for is a title block with attributes to modify the text, or even using diesel with "rtext" from the bonus tools.

Flores

[Kate M]

Like Flores said, viewports allow you to "look" into modelspace to see what you drew there, but there isn't anything that goes the other way -- if you put something in paperspace, there's no way to see it in modelspace. So when you put your titleblock on a layout, then go into modelspace and turn on the titleblock there, you should expect to see nothing -- because the titleblock exists only in the layout. Your layers aren't misbehaving...promise. :-)

Hope that helps...:-)

-Kate