Brightman's 2022 Layout Review

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Do you agree with him Paul?

I think you were an early adopter of the subscription payment model. Do you now feel that decision was vindicated or an error given all this?

Yes, I took the deal for 2 years.

On balance I think he makes valid criticisms.

“Half baked” springs to mind.

The sequence tag is already making work a little easier but they need to implement sequence tag per page sooner rather than later. Now that I’m using the sequence tag it would be hard to go back to my classic 2021.

It’s hard to say…

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the squiggle is called a “tilde” :slight_smile: more details than you like found here: Tilde - Wikipedia

Wow, he has so much beef.

Good afternoon everyone - I want to share how I applied automatic numbering to the axes. But while this works for the entire document, I hope the developers will make it possible to control this on 1 page


This review sums up many of my thoughts.
Having now tested all the new features of Layout I am quite underwhelmed.
The Auotext offerings seemed so promising if only meager, but upon testing I find they are just poorly considered and functionally compromised responses to our reasonable requests for development to the Layout software.

The way that the viewport related autotext, sequences, and page autotext try to solve our problem of making annotations that reference other parts of the document, or creating automatic viewport annotations such as titles and drawing number, or making an index of pages (or drawings for that matter) relies on reusing existing functionality not quite fit for the job, so we can hack together partial solutions that are time-consuming. Consider the need to re atttach multiple leaders of a drawing title that is made of grouped elements for example.
I feel like the Layout team lack courage to introduce new functionality that addresses some very clear need and instead try to get away with as little effort and innovation as possible.

I had hoped the new functionality would help with:

  • Create/manage indexes of pages
  • Create/manage indexes of drawings
  • Drag and drop scrapbook autotext block/groups such as drawing titles
  • Sequence page numbering robust enough to achieve sequences like A1.01 , A1.02 , A2.01 , A3.01 …
  • Sequences that can be reset per page
  • Create true automatic table of contents/ index of pages and possibly index of drawings
  • Per page auto text ( I could put my special formatted A1.01 page number here, and the use autotext in title bar)

Very disappointed, and as Mike say’s … I’ll just continue doing things the way I have been. There is just no really improvement in regards to these matters

:-1: :-1: :-1:

Im glad you wrote this out. It’s hard to discern if that video is about selling a tool or is a serious review with the intention of helping the dev team work on improving the tools for the next update.

I can say that one thing I would add to your list is:

  • Create/manage indexes of pages from across multiple layout files.

I was hoping to test this feature in my template. Seemed like it would only help the monatony of re-labeling everything. But the idea of adding to my re-connection process is worse than having to relabel.

I’m curious about the missing discussions about find/replace. Of all the updates that I saw, this one had more potential for time saving than any other in my opinion. And, they did update the move/copy tool to move/copy/stamp. Minor for most I guess, but I wasn’t a fan of that first version…cost me back steps almost every time I used it.

I agree Keith. It would be great to be able to manage a document set that is comprised of multiple layout files. Including the ability to create and keep updated a indexes.

I guess this suggests a completely new functionality to Layout … something like a project manager, that will have its own set of ‘autoText’ and ‘autoTables’