Opening Drawings Which Contain Hatch Fill

[workster]

Hi,

I have a drawing which contains small amounts of colour Hatch fill.

When I open this drawing using any method it takes an age to open (5 mins or more). However, if I removed the Hatch then save and close, it will re-open in a matter of seconds.

The original drawing is only 13MB (9MB without Hatch).

Does anyone have any clues on how to make the original drawing open any quicker?

I am working on a pretty decent PC with over 1GB RAM, but we see this problem on any PC we use.

Thanks for any help....

[Cad64]

I have created very large, complex drawings with big hatched areas and rarely had my filesize go over 3MB and my drawings always open quickly. Why is your filesize so large? 13MB is pretty big by Cad standards. But regardless of filesize, It should not take 5 min. to open any drawing. Is this a 2D or 3D drawing? Autodesk recommends a minimum 2GB of RAM if you're going to be working in the 3D environment.

Here is Autodesk's recommended system specs for 3D:
Intel® 3.0 GHz or greater
2 GB RAM or greater
2 GB free hard disk available not including installation
1280 x 1024 32-bit color video display adapter (True Color) 128 MB or greater, OpenGL®, or Direct3D® capable workstation class graphics card.
For Windows Vista, a Direct3D capable workstation class graphics card with 128 MB or greater is required.

You could try placing your hatch in a separate drawing and then xref it back in to your main drawing. This will keep the filesize down in the main drawing. It seems very strange though, you say you have only small amounts of hatching, but yet it's taking up 4MB worth of space in your drawing?

You might want to PURGE your drawing to get rid of things you don't need and delete any layer filters you may have.

Also, AUDIT the drawing. It may have errors that are causing it to be problematic when opening.

[workster]

Hi Cad64,

The drawing is a 2D drawing and the reason for the large file size is because it contains 52,670 complex polylines covering a vast area (over 400km's). There are only 307 Hatched areas and these are relatively small in area!

I have tried all I know to make the drawing smaller in size and have Purged & Audit the drawing, but I still have the same opening problem.

It seems that the problem is all about the Hatch, as once removed the drawing opens (almost) instantly.

Thanks for the info regarding PC spec's. We are expecting new high spec workstations very soon, so maybe this will help open the drawing quicker.

Just as a side note, this isn't the first time I have seen this problem with Hatch. It has happened before on drawings which are small in size (200-300Kb), however in this case they were also using Xrefs!!

Any further help or ideas would be gratefully received.

Thanks

[CarLB]

What style of hatch, what scale? I knew someone who was fond of dense dot patterns for color rendering and could easily turn a simple drawing into a boat anchor.

[workster]

Hi again,

The Hatch we are using is the basic Solid hatch with no scale applied (i.e. factor is 1).

I have done some more testing on the drawing in question and found that if I freeze the hatch layer then save and reopen the drawing it happens at a normal speed. However, if I then un-freeze the hatch layer it takes an age to display it (the same time it took to open the drawing if the hatch layer was unfrozen).

The drawing has 308 hatch areas and I have made sure that they are all of the same type etc., but nothing makes it display/open any quicker.

Back over to you guys!!!

[Cad64]

The solid fill hatch pattern is one of the worst, as far as taxing your system. I would suggest experimenting with another pattern, like ANSI31, and just play with the scale to adjust it. See if that helps.

I don't know what your hatch boundaries look like, but I was thinking if they were all the same size and shape, you could create a block containing the solid fill and then just copy it around to every location. That would help keep the file size down, but I don't know if it would help with the opening of the drawing. Just something else to try. A dynamic block would also work if your boundaries are all irregularly shaped.

Or, just keep the hatch frozen until you need to print. Do you really need it on while working?