For the library thing, I was just thinking longterm, that we should have all kinds of "smart objects" including annotation and doors and windows with 2D symbols placed there. The file I attached with the chair could be considered a "smart" library object. What I did in this case is create a chair file in the Parts Library and than I made a 2D view of the chair and put them all in a Link group.matthijskooijman wrote: ↑Thu May 06, 2021 8:20 pmAh, Attachment also seems interesting. I just tried this and I can indeed attach a wire to a compound to make it move along with it. And as you said, draft text and label do not support attachment, but it turns out if you just use the Part -> Attachment... menu item, then it will just add an Attachment extension to a draft text and that seems to work pretty well.
Still some caveats:
As an added advantage, you can use expressions to refer to the attached-to-object's properties, e.g.:
- You can no longer move the attached text or line with the draft move tool, I presume since that modifies placement, which is then reset by attachment. This could be fixed by making draft move smarter: If the moved object has an attachment, it could modify the attachment offset instead of the placement perhaps? Seems like a nice and generic improvement?
- Attaching a line is a bit tricky to get placement right, since wires are created with placement (0,0,0) and the position in their Points, so if you draw a line somewhere nearby the thing you want to attach to, and then attach it, the line jumps to about double the intended coordinates. If you realize what happens, this is not bad (you can fix it manually or first draw something near the origin maybe). This is something that has bitten me more often, for example also with windows based on sketches, where the sketch defines the window position, not the window's placement, which is particularly weird when you make a link to such a door and then change the link's target to another window... Oh well, maybe some tool or macro exists to clean this up somehow
Expressions do not currently work for the Text property (I tested with the Label above), but as discussed in my original post for draft label, this might be fairly easy to improve on the expression engine side of things.
I did realize that this does not fully solve my problem yet, since now the text *moves with* the compound symbol, which is nice, but this still requires manually keeping them together (i.e. putting them into the same group etc.) or otherwise ensuring that they are both selected by the section to be displayed... But maybe I can do some smartness by just putting all annotations in a layer or so, and then maybe some custom script that figures out which annotations are attached to which objects and then moves them around (or explicitly includes them in the section maybe).
I guess that's an advantage of the Host property, that creates a reverse relation that *is* traversed by the section view, AFAICS. Might be abusing that relation a bit to position a label, though...
Ah, interesting approach. However, the fact that it moves along only on one dimension and not the other probably makes it pretty much unusable for the electrical outlet symbol case, but it was nice to play around with the dimension tool a bit, might be useful for other cases.bitacovir wrote: ↑Thu May 06, 2021 7:06 pm Option 1) use Draft Dimension as text. If you select an edge of the symbol you can link a dimension. The dimension moves with the geometry, but not in all directions. In the dimension properties you can overwrite the text and hide the lines. if you select these objects you can create a arch section and use this section as base for a Techdraw ArchView.
Yeah, I tried that, but the problem is that the section view does not see texts inside the part, it probably just renders the part shape, not the objects inside the part as it does for a group (see also my original post).The same holds for a Dimension object, just checked.
Hm, using the parts library, interesting thought. I'm not sure what that means technically, but I'll play around with that, thanks.ABeton wrote: ↑Thu May 06, 2021 7:36 pm I think that it would be really good if you made a file for each annotation, and then to put each annotation file into the Parts Library from where you can either import or link them(also if you could add it to Git parts library for other people to use it would be great!). And using Group or Part objects to make complex annotations is not the most elegant solution but it works well. This is the system I used to have 2D drawings together with 3D. You can also try to use link sub-elements in an interesting way for 2D.
What do you mean by link sub-elements here?
I'll also look at the your example, thanks for that!
I discovered that if you make a sub-link of the 2D object it will follow the 2D object arround and you can still keep it in a different group or layer and change its visual properties as you wish. Maybe the same principal could be used for annotations. Also to create a sub-link an element needs to be in a Link group I think.
It is a bit difficult to explain properly how this works, but I hope it helps a bit. Try to examine the file I attached before, and see if you get an idea.
And check the topic I linked, I showed there how I did it.