Title Block - Family Types

[Craig_L]

I'm sure this has been covered somewhere before, I can't seem to find anything on what I need though...

I understand title blocks pretty well - how all the labels work etc,
What I need to do now is, have one family that comprises several different page sizes in the one family.

I would like to be able to select a family type, rather than have 8 different sizes on seperate title block families, loaded into one project. I want to be able to choose them from the drop down list within that one family.
I'm 99% sure I set this up by adding a new family type, but I can't seem to get much here to work other than creating the list of names I need, I can't work out how to assign them to each different family type (ie how to get the size of the title block to change with each named title block) - hope that makes sense...

In short, rather than loading 5 different title block families, I want to load one family that comprises all of the sizes I need.
The actual "Block" of the title block remains the same (ie images, and labels and their positioning etc are all identical across sizes - the only thing that changes is the border)

Anyone got a link to something that explains this, or do I simply need to nest in the other sizes? Whats the best way to handle this?

[jsteinhauer]

Craig,

Have you placed reference plains & constrained (labelled) dimensions? This would be the same process as creating a parametric family. I have no idea if this would work because we have several different families for our different Title Blocks.

Cheers,
Jeff S.

[Steve_Stafford]

People often want to do this but then realize it is very nearly creating all the different titleblock lines and labels on top of everything else. It becomes a monster to try to work on in the family editor. The duplication I'm referring to happens because each sheet size carries similar information but it doesn't all fit each size in exactly the same way. The major info section stretches out for biggers sizes and compresses for smaller. The labels that fit on the larger sizes have to be reduced for smaller sizes and/or moved elsewhere. The number of visibility parameters needed to manage all of the types becomes complicated and intimidating for some.

It's been my experience that more often than not, after giving it the old college try, people revert to separate families for each primary size because it is easier to work on and manage.

[Craig_L]

Thanks for the replies.
Yeah I was trying to respond to a request from my technicians saying that was what they wanted.
I ended up simply adding a parameter using dimensions for the height and length of the border - this way people can just put in any value they want, and this works just fine.
The thing I don't like here, is that there are no standard page sizes, so people just make up whatever format they want. Its annoying as I have seen pages over a meter long, and 30cm high...
Anyhow, thats this problem solved.
In response to Jeff, I thought about trying to constrain it to reference planes, however there is not this option in a title block template family. Simply adding a parameter to the dimensions did work though.