XREF attributes, master layouts, favorites, publisher, etc.

[Dennis Lee]

As a small office user of archicad for a few years now, I have one major issue that I feel is wasting a lot of my time, causing a great deal of inefficiency.

Mainly, as my skills and understanding of ArchiCAD grow over time, I would really like the changes I make to the attributes, master layouts, favorites, publisher settings, DWG translator settings (any others?) to be developed in a constant additive manner.

Right now, all of these settings are restricted to reside in each individual file itself, and every time I find out a better way to set up any of the above (let me just say OS for Office Standard from now), I change that OS setting for that individual file and it stays there.

I know that all those OS settings can be exported / imported through various files, merging, saving as template, etc., but the amount of effort that it takes to do that requires me to pretty much have a full time staff specifically tracking all those changes, constantly updating templates, etc.

I would like to know if there is any good way to keep track of this constantly evolving OS settings so that I can readily apply them to any new project or any existing project for that matter as well. This would be handy for instance if I had project that started few years ago, then stopped, and is now started again. (Right now when I open the project I did few years ago, pens are different, layers, layer combos are different, all the object settings are different, all the master, office standard, favorites, etc. are all different.) If I merge them into a new project template of course, I have to recreate all the views again and place them on the layouts all over again. (Why can't you merge both model and layout together?)

I hope what I'm trying to get across is clear enough, would appreciate any help if possible. I know that making all those OS settings automatically over ride any of the local project settings would be disasterous, but I would really like an easy option to maintain the evolving office standards and a likewise easy way to implement them to any project at any time, if you chose to. An option to keep them constantly updating comparable to an XREF concept would also be great.

[Anonymous]

On the attributes side it seems that the easy thing to do would be to incorporate them into an LCF (or PLA) which could be referenced the same way the library parts are. Since Attribute Manager can update/override them manually it seems that it shouldn't be too hard to make an automatic function for this.