Plan Production Tools

[caddjockey2000]

Just thought I would share a little information about a quirk I found in the "Plan Production Tools" portion of Civil 3D 2008. I found that the template that you use to create the "View Frames" and sheets can not have any characters other than letters and numbers not even a underscore("_") or space in the file name and/or layout tab name. I removed the underscore from both my layout tab name and drawing file name and I finally got to create plan and profile sheets.

I have found that different networks and/or server types as well as certain functions of C3D do not like any type of characters other than A thru Z and/or 0 thru 9. Even spaces and underscores are sometimes not always friendly. So I have adopted a new naming convention my IT guy suggested. I now use all letters and/or numbers with the words always being first letter capitalized and no spaces.

Example of a drawing name including job number: 1234567BaseDesign.dwg.

I have also began to name everything you can name inside of the CAD files in this way such as textstyle, dimstyles, blocks, C3D styles etc... you can name. This is just to avoid future conflicts that I can't even think of since this is not the first time I have ran into a problem with other character besides letters and numbers interfering with CAD as well as non-CAD related files.

NOTE: sometimes these characters can adversely effect the backup process performed by your server.

Hope this helps with more than just the Plan Production Tools for anyone who reads this.

[Capt. Computer Crasher]

I'm not to surprised by this. It sounds like a throw back to early Autocad and Eagle Point applications, that could not use space or underscore and names could not be more than eight characters.