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LT On-line: Lesson 9
1 Nov, 2000 By: Mark MiddlebrookXrefs: blocks writ large
Page
1: Introduction to Xrefs
My previous three LT Online lessons covered the ins and outs of using
blocks. After you've mastered blocks, you can graduate to xrefs, which
extend the block idea to hierarchies of multiple files. The concepts and
procedures described here work with AutoCAD LT 98 and 2000 and AutoCAD
Release 14 and 2000.
About
xrefs
An xref, or external reference, is like an industrial-strength block.
An xref points to a separate drawing outside the drawing you're working
on. The referenced drawing then appears on screen and on plots as part
of the original drawing, but continues to "live" as a separate
document on your hard disk. This arrangement lets you include a whole
separate drawing without increasing the size of the drawing you're working
on. But you can't explode the xref; you can only change its appearance
by editing the externally referenced drawing. If you do edit the externally
referenced drawing, the appearance of the drawing changes in all the other
drawings that reference it, too. As shown in figure
1.
 Figure 1. |
Creating a live link
to an external drawing is attaching an xref. This procedure is analogous
to inserting another DWG file into the current drawing as a block. The
most important difference is that AutoCAD maintains a live link to the
externally referenced drawing.
Drawings that you
include as xrefs in other drawings are often referred to as child drawings,
while drawings with pointers to the child drawings are parent drawings.
The big advantage
of xrefs over blocks is that if you change a child drawing, AutoCAD LT
automatically loads the change into all of the parent drawings that reference
that child drawing. AutoCAD LT loads all xrefs into the parent drawing
each time you open the parent drawing. If you change the child drawing,
the parent drawing automatically incorporates those changes.
Have you ever used Windows OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) to link a document from one program to a document in another program? Attaching an xref is similar to linking a document. Fortunately, xref reliability and performance are good (whereas OLE reliability and performance ranges from okay to awful).
Xrefs: blocks writ large
Page 1: Introduction to Xrefs
Page 2: Attaching and Layering
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