Hi,
I want to spent as little time as possible placing views on layouts and preferably no time at all on resizing drawing frames on layouts. So I'm a big fan of the Place Drawing function in de Organizer. And when placing one view on one layout (details, single floorplans), or placing multiple views which are adjustable (and therefore predictable) in width and height (sections and elevations through their markers) all is well.
But when placing multiple views which are a zoom in/portion of a larger model (ie. floorplan of one row of many rows in a development) on a single layout there is room for improvement.
The grid function of Master Layout is helpful, because Place Drawing centers all the views on in gridcells, but when the zoom and thus the frame of a view is larger than a grid cell, the drawing extents past the grid cell. It would be great if the grid cell acts as Illustrator clipping masks or as InDesign image frames from InDesign. The optional grid cell lines already detect when a drawing extents over the line (because then it will be hidden) so hopefully this is not a difficult feature to add.
And adding to that, it would be great to be able to graphically adjust the grid cells on each Master Layout. Now it is not possible to make a 3x3 grid, because AC combines 4 cells in one larger cell.
And it would also be fantastic to be able to place one view on multiple layouts at once by selection one view and multiple layouts in the Navigator and use Place Drawing.
I am aware of, and using, Save current zoom option in the View Settings and the Crop Drawing to Frame setting in the Drawing Settings. The problem with this function is that this Frame is determined by the active window size (which is adjustable by adding toolbars or change the size of the Navigator). So controlling this window size and corresponding zoom would also be an option, like setting 3D window size is also an option.
Reverse engineering the proportions of the active window is possible by using the drawing on a layout as a reference. But this is a labor intensive workaround and my active window size changes quite a bit from time to time, depending on having functions like the design option toolbar visible or not.
Thanks.
Open