CompuServe Messages

[Continued] (Pardon me, people, and Tony, if this sounds like a flame. It's not; I just feel *very* strongly about this type of control showing up in R12.) I don't think that the simple change to color settings would be at all difficult for the existing users. How many people do you see on the forum complaining "hey, why can someone turn off layers from a drawing of mine they've xrefed!?". (0) How many times do we see lurkers complaining "why do my layer property changes to xref'd layers dissappear when I save the drawing?" (more than I can count). I do agree with your opinion that there is a need for xref's of the sort you wish for, but what do we do: take visretain away completely, and transfer that functionality (and more) to your wish? Why not continue to extend Xref's, and make the new "external thingie" a *pure* canonical representation of an external file? Lastly, we *are* going to see more types of blocks/xrefs in the future; one of my earlier wishes hit about 4 different enhancements on the nail, and they were already on the wishlist. You say such changes will make their use more complicated? True, somewhat, but there are people that desire that kind of flexability/power. Things like blocks that have a scale factor relative to whatever size the drawing is plotted at, a way to xref only portions of external files (for puposes of dealing with *huge* external files, much in the same way GEO/SQL works), or for intimately twiddling with the appearance and/or visibility of individual nested entities of external files. I don't want all of this to appear as soon as R12, but I *do* think it will come, and will be welcomed. If it is possible for your proposed "external thingy" to appear in R12 with controll over color of external layers, and keep the current xref scheme, than I *fully* support your wish; I think it's a very good concept, but I don't want to have to put off a fix to VISRETAIN to R13 to accomplish it!!!!!