Drawing Manager

For more information, see Managing and Updating Placed Drawings.

To open the Drawing Manager, do one of the following:

choose File > External Content > Drawing Manager

click the Drawing Manager icon from the pop-up menu at the upper left corner of the Navigator/Organizer:

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choose Window > Palettes > Drawing Manager

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The top left corner contains four commands (icons). These commands are active only if one or more drawings is selected in the Drawing Manager’s drawing list:

Link Drawing

Links the selected drawing to either an external source or an internal view.

Break Drawing Link

Click to break the link of the selected drawing. A warning window will ask whether you want to permanently break the current link.

Update Drawing

Click to update the drawing. (This command icon is also available in the Navigator Layout Book.)

Delete Drawing

Click to delete the selected drawing(s) after confirming the warning message.

Note: Deleting a drawing is undoable ONLY if the window containing the drawing is active at the time you delete it.

Check Status

Click to check the update status of the selected drawing(s), if its status shows “Needs Checking”.

The main part of the Drawing Manager lists all the Drawings in the Project (in both Layout Book and Model views) together with their properties.

List of Drawings

By default, the Type, ID, Name, Status, Layout (Placed to), Source View and Path are shown for each drawing. You can sort items by any of these properties by clicking on its column header. You can then perform a secondary sorting function: clicking a second column header will further sort within the hierarchy obtained by the first sorting. To customize the list columns, right-click any column header to bring up a list of available columns, or click the black arrow at the right end of the list columns. Toggle these on and off as needed. The column widths can be graphically resized.

Each column lists a drawing property:

Type: The icon in the ‘T’ column indicates the Drawing’s source type (e.g. a Floor Plan view or a PDF file).

ID: Shows Drawing ID.

Name: Shows Drawing name.

Status: Shows one of the following update statuses for the selected Drawing:

OK: Drawing is updated.

Modified: Source has been modified. Click the Update button to update the drawing.

Missing: The source of the linked drawing cannot be found.

Not Accessible: The source file is either an old Teamwork file (a Teamwork file format from a pre-13 version of ARCHICAD), or it is an ARCHICAD 13 or later Teamwork project located on a BIMcloud/BIM Server. You do not have access to this source, because you are using either a Demo version of ARCHICAD, or a non-Teamwork protection key; or you do not have Teamwork access rights to this source.

To be Updated: Temporary status of a drawing included in the set of Drawings to be updated, but the update process has not affected this drawing yet.

Updating: Temporary status of a drawing currently being updated.

Embedded. This Drawing has no link and cannot be updated. (If it once had a link which has since been broken, the Drawing manager displays its former source view for information purposes only.)

Needs Checking: ARCHICAD’s automated background quick-check function cannot determine definitively whether the drawing needs an update or not. If this status appears, you can either:

- click the Check Status button to see whether the drawing is either OK or Modified. In the latter case, if the drawing’s update method is Manual, you can decide whether to update it or not. (A Drawing set to Automatic update will be updated as soon as you activate its Layout or window.)

- click the Update button to achieve an updated status.

Placed To: Shows name of Layout or Model View on which Drawing is placed.

Source View: Shows the source view’s position in the Navigator’s hierarchical structure (as displayed in Navigator Project Map). If the Drawing source is not an ARCHICAD view, then this column displays the source file name and (in the case of a multi-page PDF document source) the page number from which the Drawing is created.

Note: If the Drawing source is a DWG paperspace, this field will also indicate the viewport number.

Path: Shows the location of the drawing’s source view (e.g. either Internal, or its file path).

Click on a column head to sort Drawings by that property. Sorting priorities are indicated by arrowheads in the column head.

Open Source View: Click this button to open the source view of the selected drawing. (This button is grayed for Drawings having an external source.)

Settings: Click this button to open the selected drawing(s)’ Settings dialog box.

Note: To assign a particular drawing parameters to multiple Drawings at the same time (such as a uniform Pen Set to all Drawings in the Layout Book), select several or all drawings in Drawing Manager and click Settings. Any settings you modify in the Drawing Settings dialog box will be applied to all the selected drawings (other Drawing Settings will remain as-is for each drawing).

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