After taking off a few days last week I am finally getting back into the swing of things. Just before I left for vacation last week we had a pretty ugly support issue spring up. I really have to commend the folks at Autodesk and Avatech (my reseller) for the help they provided. While troubleshooting the issue I learned quite a bit that I hope to share here on The CAD Geek at some point. No less, even if my time away from the office wasn’t without interruption, it was a welcome retreat to get away, and simply enjoy some time off.
Back in the office, I have just about gotten everything caught up, and wanted to share a quick tip on how to deal with stubborn annotative objects. If you make use of annotative objects inside AutoCAD, chances are you’ve gone to modify an object, and AutoCAD just ignores you. MOVE, COPY, even ERASE do nothing, and you’re left wandering – what now?
When I first encountered this issue my solution was to restart AutoCAD. That certainly wasn’t the most efficient “solution”. Then I stumbled upon another method that made this little roadblock a little less frustrating – the AUDIT command. The trick here is rather than answering “Yes” to fix errors, tell AutoCAD “No” you do not want to fix errors. It seems a little counter-intuitive I know, but running the AUDIT command and answering “No” actually does something. It unlocks your annotative objects so you can modify them once again (and don’t have to restart CAD).
I have also heard disabling the “Maintain visual fidelity for annotative objects” (Open and Save tab within the OPTIONS command) prevents this little hiccup from happening in the first place. Of course, you probably won’t want to disable this if you are exchanging files with anyone using a version earlier than AutoCAD 2008. AutoCAD 2007 and earlier do not have the annotative feature, and the maintain visual fidelity option makes your annotative drawing compatible with those earlier versions of AutoCAD.
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[...] Trick for Stubborn Annotative Objects [...]
Watch the 2007 version of those files that use multiple scales and get saved with the maintain visual fidelity because your layer list will expand. For example, if you have an 10 scale annotative object on the DIM layer and that it also uses both 20 and 50 scales, you will have a layer named DIM@20 and DIM@50 scale layer.
It takes you a little aback when you open that drawing in 2008 or 2009 if saved at the 2007 level.