Architect Special Interest Group October 2017 (am)

In this session, we went through an overview of the new Title Block Border Tool in Vectorworks 2018.

Topics Covered:

• 00:16    Rather than wait until I could write a manual on the new Title Block Border Tool, we decided to take it for a test drive. The most important thing to understand about the new title block is that it is controlled by an object style. An object style allows for a continuum of option flexibility—you can decide to have all the options open or to have them predetermined, already set. The extremes of the spectrum are, on the one end, a plug-in object, whose options are totally flexible and which isn’t like any other object, and, on the opposite end, a symbol, which has all the options already set and which is identical to all the other instances of that symbol. So, looking at our title block, we asked where we wanted it to fall along this continuum—what parts did we want to be flexible and what parts did we want to be fixed? We experimented with editing our title block to see how greater or lesser flexibility in our options affected what we wanted to achieve. I prefer to edit object styles in the Resource Manager, but you can also make changes to the title block’s object style by clicking on the Title Block Border Settings button in the Object Info palette. We walked through all of the options for our title block—Sheet Border, Sheet Zones/Grids, Project Data, Sheet Data, Revision Data, Issue Data, North Point, Drawing Stamp, Document Options—and set the object style how we wanted it. You’ll probably find that, to maintain the consistency of your sheets from project to project, you’ll want your object style to control many of the options in your title block. When browsing the title blocks in your Resource Manager, you can tell if they’re controlled by an object style when their titles are in red text.
• 10:46    While we still had the Title Block Border Style dialog box open, we clicked on the Edit Title Block Layout button to change the look of our title block. When we clicked on any text in the layout, the Title Block Data Link section of that text’s Object Info palette allowed us to quickly attach that text value to a parameter, such as “Project Data.Project Title#”—much easier than the old way! We added an extra box to the title block’s layout and put my logo in it!
• 19:54    There is also a Title Block Manager. We experimented with using the revision and issue data. The new changes allow you to efficiently and effectively track the revisions that you make to your drawing sheets and to monitor what sheets have been issued to which party. In addition, you can control, for example, how many revisions appear on a drawing sheet—you can choose just to show the three most current revisions!

These tools make Vectorworks more powerful and more helpful. Instead of starting to work with the new title blocks like they’re borders, the key is to start working them as objects that have an object style. In addition, it’s a real benefit to be able to make all of the changes in one place!
Architect October 2017 am
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