Chat with an old structural guy made me rethink my layer order

Ran into a retired structural drafter at the supply house last week. He said I was layering my xrefs backwards, putting structural first when it should be dead last for cleaner plotting. Been doing it my way for 6 years, but I tried his method on a commercial job in Dallas and the file size dropped by 20 megabytes. Anyone else ever get a tip from a stranger that changed how you work?

2 comments

2 Comments

adam_lewis29d ago

Wait, you saw a file size drop of 20 megs just from moving the xref order? That's crazy, I had no idea it made that big a difference. An old mechanical guy told me the same thing about 5 years back, and I thought he was full of it until I tried it on a hospital project. The plotting was way cleaner too, less layer clutter and fewer random overrides messing things up. I still put structural first for my own sanity when I'm editing, but I always reorder it before I send to plot now. It's one of those little tricks that just works, even if it feels backwards at first.

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johnson.daniel29d agoMost Upvoted

I don't know, I have to push back a little here. I've seen way too many cases where reordering xrefs actually breaks something downstream, especially on civil projects where the base map is tied to a different coordinate system than the architectural. The file size drop might be real on some setups but I've swapped xref order plenty of times and saw maybe a couple hundred kilobytes difference, not twenty megs. To me it always felt like one of those forum legends that gets passed around until someone decides to test it and finds out it only works in very specific conditions. If you're running a clean file with all xrefs in the same coordinate system and no nested references it could help, but most of the projects I deal with are a mess of different sources. Are you using a particular tool for reordering or just doing it manually through the xref manager?