What was the 'secret' to opening two layouts in X11?


DzinEye
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2 minutes ago, KenL-sdd said:

Hold the control key down and quickly double click on chief to open.

Sometimes this needs to be done a few times to work.

Thanks!
Okay, so it sounds like I'm opening a whole new instance of Chief then, not just opening another layout tab.

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There is the normal secret:  Holding down the Control key and opening a second instance of Chief.  I usually did this by right clicking on Chief in the task bar, holding down the Control key, and then left clicking on Chief Architect Premier X11.  Give it a moment to open the second instance before letting go of the control key.  As Ken said, it can take a few tries; however, the only reason for this though in my experience is that people don't give it enough time.

 

Then there is the super secret method (always worked fine for me, but only do this at your own risk because the program wasn't designed with this in mind):  Trick Chief into opening 2 layouts by using a non-existent font.  Long story short, Chief loads layouts into the program but doesn't actually fully open them when there's a missing font, so you can use this behavior to trick Chief into pre-loading multiple layouts and then opening them both.  Here's how:

 

  1. Place the following CAD block off to the side in your desired layouts.  It won't hurt anything, it just uses a font that you likely don't have on your system... Multilayoutfont block.calibz
  2. Save your layouts.
  3. Close Chief.  It's very important that Chief be closed before trying to open both layouts.
  4. From File Explorer, multiple select both layouts, right click, and Open
  5. Give Chief a little time to load both layouts before clicking on anything in the Replace Fonts dialog.  You'll know Chief has loaded both layouts when you have 2 Replace Fonts dialogs (which you can see by dragging one off to the side). 

Again, only do that last one at your own risk.  To date it's worked just fine for me, but Chief wasn't designed to do it and as such, and it may cause you problems when attempting to send to layout, switch pages, re-link files, etc. because of the fact Chief was only designed to deal with one layout at a time.  For simple copy paste operations, it seems to work without a hitch though (other than the fact switching layout pages changes the page in both layouts simultaneously).  In fact, you can even send to layout, but Chief can only send to one of them...

 

...of course in X12 its designed to work with multiple layouts, and it works great.

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23 minutes ago, Alaskan_Son said:

Give it a moment to open the second instance before letting go of the control key.  As Ken said, it can take a few tries.  The only reason for this though in my experience is that people don't give it enough time.

Thanks for the tip!... keeping the ctrl key down is definitely the secret to this secret.   

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7 hours ago, Alaskan_Son said:

Holding down the Control key and opening a second instance of Chief

 

You can also disable the second instance behavoiur ( at your own risk) in the Chief .ini file.   

 

( if you can't find it , then don't use this method.... and make a backup of the .ini file 1st if you do.)

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