dal-designs Posted July 17, 2014 Share Posted July 17, 2014 I apologize if there's already a thread about this topic; if so, a search did not locate it. Anyway, this involves Reference Edit. Today I received an AutoCAD 2000 set of house plans from another designer that was nothing but blocks: text, hatch patterns, dimensions, linework- it all consist of some sort of blocks (see attached image). Now, I've worked with AutoCAD for over ten years, and never have I once seen this before (might be hard to believe, but there it is). I am editing these plans for my client, and I want to change the text and dimension styles in addition to making the changes to the layout and elevations that she wants. The problem is: I have no idea what these 'blocks' are, where they came from, or how to edit them! EXPLODE does indeed explode them, but I would rather not do that to dimensions and hatch patterns! AT first I thought they were some sort of external reference, but XREF shows no files even associated with the drawing. So can anyone explain to me what these blocks are, what advantage there is to using them, and how I might edit them without exploding everything all over the place? I am using AutoCAD 2002, by the way. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RobDraw Posted July 18, 2014 Share Posted July 18, 2014 I can't see the image from here but I've got an idea of what is going on. You are on the right track with the XREF idea. They were probably XREFs that have been inserted into the drawing. Another possibility is it was created in another program and converted to .dwg. Either way it is appropriate to EXPLODE once for each block. At that point, if the dimensions are exploded, they were that way before you exploded. For a background, it doesn't matter if they are exploded if all you plan on doing is change styles. If you plan on making physical changes to what they are dimensioning, that's another story. On a side note, for our backgrounds we either delete or turn off dimensions. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dal-designs Posted July 18, 2014 Author Share Posted July 18, 2014 Another possibility is it was created in another program and converted to .dwg. Well, I talked to the original designer today and he doesn't use AutoCAD. So...it's a conversion issue and already I suspect that I have no choice but to explode the things I need to change. I guess "AutoCAD compatible" is a pretty broad term! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RobDraw Posted July 20, 2014 Share Posted July 20, 2014 Yeah, it just means that the file can be opened in AutoCAD. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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