Opinions on Major Philosophy Change for TD in v0.19?

[freedman]

wandererfan, thank you for taking the time to answer my questions.

[NormandC]

Is there anything that restricts this tool to Arch? It seems like it would be broadly useful - Link3(?), Assembly2+, @DeepSOIC's reader/writer, etc.

Yes, it would be very useful in multiple scenarios and I may very well use it in the future. It could be in Part or PartDesign. This is something I use heavily at work, I create a new document and import a part from another file to use as basis for the new document.

Arch Reference is in Arch because Yorik found it useful and implemented it for his use (it may be even more critical to Arch/BIM work). It's not the only tool in the Arch workbench that could be useful to other workbenches. I once used the Arch Wall tool to create support pattern for a 3D printed part. Of course I had to edit the default wall thickness and height

I'm not sure that it speeds things up, if I use my test file I don't see much difference between the Arch tool and doing a "Simple copy".

I wasn't clear, the speed improvement is rather only for the 3D model document which no longer contains the TechDraw page(s) and views. On the TD side, the same geometry has to be projected so there is no gain. For me the advantage is that it's parametrically linked to the original document, which a simple copy isn't. Of course in your case, one has to be very cautious about updating it by accident. So maybe an improvement to Arch Reference may be to add a "lock update" feature like TD's Toggle KeepUpdated.