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Setting up new attributes with blocks can be real cumbersome if you don’t do it often. The other item is managing Xref files to the parent drawing. If I have a new version of a parent drawing and wish to use the existing xrefs which are located outside the new project folder, I often have to manually attached the xrefs to the new dwg. There is supposed to be an expresstool for this, but I couldn’t make it work. Good Luck!
Hi Michel
I have a few methods for building blocks with attributes, which I really should blog about here. Like a lot of my tools, I have dozens of half-finished blog posts in the background, waiting to see if there’s a demand for them before I invest my time in them.
1. Explode (or edit-in-place) an existing block that is close to what you need. Rename it.
2. Keep a drawing with collections of commonly-used attributes you can build blocks from
3. I wrote a tool to generate sequences of attributes. See http://www.cadbloke.com/cad-tools-survey-2011/#comment-388
4. Encourage me to write a block-builder tool, or a tool that collects all the blocks from all the drawings and build a library. Suggestions welcome at http://cadbloke.uservoice.com/forums/130553-cad-tools-i-want-to-see
Keeping attributes in order and maintaining standards for fonts, properties, snap-to-grid etc is tedious but necessary. It makes maintaining drawings a lot less error-prone and less-annoying.
I don’t have an answer for your XREF problem, sorry.
cheers
Ewen