Everthing points to hatch..

I work for a house builder who produce site plans for construction and I have recently introduced CAD Standards. We now use one base drawing which is referenced into layout drawings. All is well for working drawings, but when we try to produce a coloured layout for marketing the drawing crashes, will not reopen and kicks you out of AutoCAD if you try to recover it. All we are doing is referencing the base drawing into model space and the referenced drawing is then coloured using solid hatch. We can only hatch a certain amount (not always the same) before this occurs and this has happened on a number of our drawings. The layout drawings average around 1Mb to 2Mb. The other strange things we have had on these particular drawings is MText copying itself many times on top of each other.

Anyone got any suggestions?

 

Using Associative hatch on XREF'd elements has always been buggy for us. Our solution was to use non-associative hatching.

 

would you be using solid hatch?.. (solid hatch in 2k5 vanil has always
effected our drawings).

as to the multiple copies of objects.. you should try running "overkill"
on your drawings..

 

Are you suggesting that using solid hatch in A2K5 on xref's or not is no better than in A2K2? We are preparing to upgrade and I was hoping that this would resolve this issue.

At the risk of looking stupid, what do you mean running overkill?

 

It's not the solid hatch that is the problem, but rather ASSOCIATIVE hatches to XREF'd elements. The XREF is treated like a single entity for the purpose of hatching and every possible hatch configuration must be checked within that element. Making the hatch NON-ASSOCIATIVE solved the problem for us.

OVERKILL is an express tool that removes duplicate elements using a fuzz-factor.

 

Yep.
Xrefs are goof as references. To do what you want, go into the reference,
hatch and block it out.

Our solution was to use non-associative hatching.

 

regarding solid hatch.. for us it was the hatch itself (we never use
associative hatch). just a few of the problems we ran into with 2k5 +
solid hatch are:
- slow file opening/saving/closing
- large plot files (sometimes 10-20x larger than normal)

our solution was to use the ansi31 (or insert your line hatch here) and
set it to a REALLY small scale (looks like a solid hatch, but without
the problems).