Drafting Views have an Origin Too

Drafting views look like a blank sheet of paper we can drop your pen and start sketching in. We can but it might help to know that they do have an origin and you can end up quite from from the origin if we use an external file to sketch over (which happens a lot). I routinely encounter projects that have very large drafting views, when you know where the origin is.

The old trick to find the origin in Revit was to import/link a DWG with a crosshair at the world coordinate system origin. Linked via Origin to Origin places that DWG at the origin of the view. The PyRevit application has a handy function to place a pair of intersecting lines at the origin of a view. I find I just use that now instead. It's about the same number of "clicks" either way.

Now, the natural question to ask is, "Does it matter?" I don't know but if large extents are bad in model views I can reasonably infer that it might also be bad in drafting views. I don't have any evidence that this model was bad because drafting views were huge. I do know that some bad models I've encountered also had drafting views with very large extents. When I deal with a such a model it is one of the things I consider (of the many things, so many things).

Good housekeeping isn't just for the model.

Dept. of Off Topic - Site Cleanup

I don't have a sense of how attached people are to what I've stored on this site but I do know that I've grown weary of scrolling my own site to get to various links. I've condensed all the links that I used to have on the right side bar to the maximum of ten sub-pages that blogger allows.

If you've become accustomed to finding something via my blog then most likely you'll find it on the sub-pages now. I hope that you'll find the shorter length of the blog page overall as pleasing as I do. Another advantage of the sub-pages is that I can use more html formatting to start considering flagging blogs or sites that I want to highlight as more active etc.

I have been told from time to time that people rely on the Builds and Updates page to check for the most recent build information. I try to keep that as current as possible and it is easier to check the build number here than on Autodesk's site since they buried the build number in the pdf they issue for each web update.

I also increased the maximum number of posts that can appear to five so that the posts and the sidebar are nearly the same length. I hope these subtle changes make the site a bit cleaner and clearer. As you were...