Inherited baseplate set: unresolved xref, substituted font, wrong units, printing construction layer
You inherit the drawing set for a pump baseplate from a departing engineer. On your workstation the title block appears; at the fabricator's it reads 'Xref Unresolved' and the sheet number is blank. All dimension text has changed from the company ISOCPEUR style to a narrow simplex substitute, and three long notes now overflow their leader lines. The plotted PDF shows the 0.35 mm object lines as hairlines, and the layer 'CONSTRUCTION', which the company standard says must never plot, prints solid black. Layers are named 0, Layer1, Dim and Text instead of the company standard (OBJ, HID, CEN, DIM, TXT, TITLE, XREF). The file reports INSUNITS = 6 (metres) although it was drawn in millimetres, so the 1600 mm baseplate inserts 1000× too large in the millimetre template. The title block is xrefed from X:/proj/tb/A1.dwg. Geometry in model space is correct: 1600 mm overall, 24 × M16 anchor holes, 12 mm soleplate. The drawing is due to the fabricator tomorrow.
1. Diagnose the unresolved xref and the font substitution, and give a fix that will survive being sent to a fabricator who has none of your network paths or fonts.
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Two separate portability faults, both expected when a DWG leaves the originating machine.
Xref: the reference is stored with a path on a mapped drive (X:/proj/tb/A1.dwg). The fabricator has no X: drive, so the reference cannot resolve. Fix by one of:
- Move the title block into a subfolder beside the sheet, set the xref path type to Relative path, and save; the reference then travels with the folder structure.
- Or send the set with eTransmit, which repaths and packages all dependencies and can bind xrefs.
- For an issue-only PDF, binding (or plotting with the xref resolved) is fine; for a DWG the fabricator must edit, prefer eTransmit with 'include fonts' and 'include plot style tables'.
Font: the style references ISOCPEUR.SHX, which the recipient does not have; AutoCAD falls back to FONTALT (commonly simplex.shx), which has different character widths, so text reflows and notes overflow leaders. Fix by:
- eTransmit with 'Include fonts', or
- switch the style to a TrueType equivalent (ISOCPEUR.TTF) that installs with the drawing's font pack, or
- use a font the fabricator certainly has and re-check every note's fit at A1 and A3.
Always re-plot to PDF after the fix and inspect the notes; text fit is a plot property you cannot verify on screen alone. Set FONTALT and FONTAPATH deliberately on the issuing machine, because silent substitution is what hides this class of fault.
2. How do you correct the units problem so the baseplate inserts at full size, and why is scaling the block by 0.001 the wrong fix?
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INSUNITS = 6 tells any receiving drawing that one drawing unit equals one metre. The geometry is in millimetres, so a 1600-unit baseplate is declared to be 1600 m and is scaled by 1000 when inserted into a millimetre drawing (INSUNITS = 4). The number in the file is right; the declaration is wrong.
Correct route:
- Run the drawing-units command (-DWGUNITS) or UNITS and set insertion units to millimetres (4). If the command offers to scale objects in the drawing, decline - the geometry already is millimetres.
- Open the target template and set its INSUNITS to millimetres, then save the template; otherwise every future insert repeats the fault.
- Verify with a known length: DIST across the 1600 mm overall, and a dimension check on the 24 M16 hole pattern (M16 clearance at Ø18 at 150 mm pitch, for example). Do not accept 'it looks right'.
- Check the block definitions and any inserted blocks for their own units setting; a block definition can carry a stale unit.
Why not SCALE by 0.001: it fixes this insertion only, leaves the file mis-declared for the next user, breaks associativity between geometry and dimensions, corrupts annotative scaling and any layout viewport scales, and makes the model's 1:1 principle a lie. Unit declarations are metadata - fix the metadata, not the geometry. Audit and purge afterwards so a stale block definition does not reintroduce the wrong units.
3. Set out the layer and plot-style corrections needed so CONSTRUCTION stops printing and the output matches the company standard.
Read the worked answer
Treat layers and plot styles as one problem, because a layer only stops printing if both the layer property and the plot style table agree.
Layers:
- Map the inherited names to the company standard rather than renaming one by one - use LAYER TRANSLATE with a mapping file (0 → OBJ, Layer1 → OBJ/HID as appropriate, Dim → DIM, Text → TXT), then purge the old names.
- For CONSTRUCTION, set the layer's Plot property to No. Turning the layer off or freezing it also suppresses plotting, but it hides the geometry from the drafter, which is not what a construction layer is for. DEFPOINTS is an alternative for a few entities, not for a whole layer of construction geometry.
- Check for entities drawn on layer 0 with per-object colour or lineweight overrides - these defeat any layer scheme and are the usual reason a 'non-plotting' layer still prints.
Plot styles: 4. 'Plot with plot styles' pointed at a CTB that no longer exists, so the plot fell back to no style: colours printed as colours and lineweights as defaults. Restore the CTB to the server path, add that path to the plot style search path, and confirm the table maps every used colour to black with the correct lineweights (0.35 object, 0.25 hidden and dimension, 0.7 border). 5. Plot object lineweights must be enabled, or lineweights must come from the layers; a screen 'lineweight display' toggle has no effect on the PDF. 6. Re-plot and measure the PDF: check a 0.35 mm line and the border, confirm the construction geometry is absent, and confirm text is legible at both A1 and A3.