Flatten Express Tool
Be judicious in your use of the Flatten command. While it is a very useful tool, particularly when trying to deal with non-coplanar objects in a 2-D drawing, it does have it’s quirks. If you select objects globally, and you select Blocks, you could be in BIG trouble.
What will happen is this:
Each instance of each block will be renamed with the suffix “–FLAT-#” (# being a sequential numbering of the block, i.e. Arrow-FLAT-1, Arrow-FLAT-2, etc. ad nauseum)
The blocks will all land on the current layer, even though they will retain the color of the original layer. They’ll LOOK correct, but won’t actually BE correct. You may not even notice this has happened for quite a long time.
If you are going to use this powerful tool, I recommend that you carefully select only the objects you actually need to flatten – lines, circles, polylines, etc. If there are too many to select individually, you should use the QSelect command or the old-fashioned Filter command.
If you have gotten into the above mentioned mess, and not caught it quickly enough to use a recent backup, you may be able to remedy the situation using a combination of the Filter and Qselect commands, and the Express Tools command “Replace block with another block”. This will require patience and perseverance, but should work pretty well.
Good Luck
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Originally Posted by lafleur
