Richard_Morrison

I absolutely agree with everything Michael has said here.

Yes, I really should have stated a by-layer arrow style.

Ed, You might not be aware that you can set your text with leader to input standard text by going to Preferences>Text and unchecking Rich Text. Also, you can select all leader arrow lines at once by selecting "text line with arrow" and group selecting. I would love to see arrows added to defaults and have suggested this, but sometimes it takes a few years.

My point exactly. Try a better dictionary. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/forte

Even worse is when people correct you when you are already correct, such as when you correctly pronounce the French word "forte" (meaning one's strength) as "FORT" and someone says, "don't you mean FOR-tay?" (Forte -- pronounced FOR-tay -- is an Italian word, used primarily in music to mean "loud") No, I don't, and neither do you. They are two separate and distinct words from different languages with different meanings. This is a no-win word. Pronounce it correctly, and some think you are incorrect. Try to be colloquial, and the people who know better think you are poorly educated. So usually I just avoid the word altogether. I'm still not happy with "ray-casted", but at least "casted" was used many centuries ago as a past participle. But it is (or should be) archaic now. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Nope. Must have been someone else. However, the ability to store PDFs in the user library would be a good addition.

Ummm.... Select Layout Box, Ctrl-C, switch to other layout, Ctrl-V.

I am talking about copying a layout box that has a CAD Detail in it. (i.e. Open a CAD Detail, send to Layout.) Copying a layout box which was sent from a CAD Detail produces inconsistent results. The copy is labeled correctly, has the correct scale, but is sometimes blank, sometimes just a very different origin from the original detail. Copying a layout box that has a floor plan seems to work fine.

There is a huge difference between specifications and code notes. Specifications are for the contractor, and define contractual obligations. If you are working directly for a contractor, most will opt for as few specifications as possible. If you are working for an Owner, that is a different ball of wax. Over the past thirty-some years I have done it both ways, and found that if you put the spec's in a book, that book will stay in the contractor's truck, and worse, may not even be seen by a subcontractor during the bid. For a number of years, I was adamant about the electrical spec's being on the electrical sheet, for example, because contractors would tear apart the plans and give the electrician just the one electrical sheet. If the electrical spec's weren't included on that sheet, the electrician might not ever see them, and then you have a mess when the electrician claims he never saw the requirement for metal boxes and currently every installed box is plastic with a bunch of cracked nailing fins. When you can now distribute the whole set electronically as a single file, it doesn't matter as much, because there isn't an excuse that the sub never got the spec's.

Michael, I had problems with both. Here's the quote I received, "We do not currently support copying what we call CAD details in the program from plan to plan. My guess is you are either referring to a CAD Block containing a detail or a layout box containing a detail." I'll go back and try again. Maybe I misunderstood the response when I reported it.

I don't know that there is a distinction, but opening and resending isn't much more difficult than copy/pasting, so I didn't press the issue.

Well, I'm only telling you what I was told by Brian Beck. It generally was problematic for me. Maybe it's because I was trying to copy CAD Details rather than plans. Not using the Project Browser. Copy/pasting text and annotation items from layout to layout worked fine, however.

Yes. You can't copy and paste details. (Occasionally it works, usually it doesn't. But I have been informed by Chief that it was not designed to work that way.) You need to double-click a detail on your Details.Layout and then send to your Project.Layout. When you go to send, there is a dropdown that lets you pick which open layout you want to send to. Otherwise, that is the way I would do it. However, I would put each detail in its own CAD Detail in the Details.Layout file.

In X12, it can work like this: Have an "Office Std. Details" (OSD) layout with all your details. You can store your CAD Details in the OSD Layout -- one detail per CAD Detail -- and then send them to the same OSD Layout. You can have all your eave details on one layout page, for example. So categories stay nicely organized and details are completely visual. You have a Project layout, too. In X12, you can have two layouts open at the same time. Open the OSD layout and find the detail you want. Double-click to open. Immediately send to layout, choosing the Project Layout file. This is VERY fast, and keeps the scale of the CAD Detail. BTW, if you want to create a new detail that's similar to an existing one, you can "Duplicate" the CAD detail in the project browser, and immediately start editing.

This is also one the improvements listed for X12.