Doc,
Back to the tangential topic of Layers. Some seem to want to get rid of them, so I'm glad to see your later post, which is pretty much what we do at the moment. Vit was in luck after all and I have posted above to support that.
To the forum in general,
We had a post here the other day about what to do if you have a component comprised of several solids only one of which needed to be hidden, but only in one of several views. Hiding the component wouldn't work, nor would blanking. You could create reference sets and add a second component as a view from another part so it doesn't trouble the parts list, but what if you don't own the other component for write access. Even when it seemed to me that it was obvious that there was an easy solution which would be to put that other solid on a separate layer and use the visible in view. I still got pretty much howled down against using layers.
What is it with layers that is so bad after all this time?
Is there some form of indoctrination going on against layers that I'm largely unaware of outside of what I see here in the forum?
In the usual way of making drawings under the master model concept there is only the border or pattern, notes and dimensions on the face of the drawing and the components added to the file and that is it. Most of the time you can do the whole thing on one layer, though many use a separate layer for the borders. How hard can it be on the odd occasion when you need to that you should put something on an empty layer and label the category for all to find. You can even list the layers in the model navigator for added visibility.
There should be ample freedom from site to site to develop standards that can be understood within the organizational culture. It means that you can develop an expectation about how each other will format their data. But to extend that approach to exclude any tool that others are capable of using, but you're not familiar with, is to adopt a fragile approach to doing things. I see it prompting an ignorance of what can be done so that good tools are often forsaken and the whole system has to be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator.
I don't know about others out there but I see this happening and the anti layer movement has that flavor. In any case I didn't buy an expensive high end CAD system only to have people tell me that it doesn't suit their dumbing down agenda to use all the tools that are available. I say this because right off the bat I may have to work with all of you eventually at some time in the future, and I do wish that that future will be a bright one and not dumbed down.
Best Regards
Hudson