by: Melinda Heavrin
Display Themes in ACA 2011
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he Display Themes tool has been around since release 2006, but is not widely used and is, therefore, under-appreciated by many. Display themes will work with any AutoCAD® Architecture (ACA) object you have created. Manual properties of an object—such as a wall’s fire rating or a door’s manufacturer—are not typically visible in a drawing. Display themes lets you incorporate such nongraphic data in your drawing (both 2D and 3D) by using certain colors, fills, or hatches to highlight objects that meet the criteria or theme rules that you have established in a display theme style. For example, you could define a property named Function for room objects and then set up a theme rule that specifies that rooms with a Function value equal to “storage” will be displayed with a solid cyan fill. A display theme can be activated in a drawing by using a display theme tool to insert a display theme legend, which explains the meaning of color, fills, or hatches specified in the theme. Note that if you use a display theme style that is provided with AutoCAD Architecture 2011, the property set definitions and property data formats for the style are already created for you. March 2011
AutoCAD Architecture
AutoCAD Architecture 2011
CREATING DISPLAY THEMES There is a simple five-step process that you can follow to create a display theme. 1. Create property data formats that you will use in your theme. The formats you create will determine how your data is displayed in the display theme legend. 2. Create property set definitions for objects in your drawing. Here you will incorporate formats from Step 1. 3. Create a display theme style. This will specify the format for the legend of your display theme as well as what objects will be highlighted in your drawing. The legend is a key that will incorporate property set definitions from Step 2. It will specify which visual indicator will be applied to which objects in a drawing and what the content will be. 4. Attach property set data to the objects for inclusion in your display theme. 5. Activate the display theme by adding the legend to the drawing. Now, let’s look at each of these steps in a little more detail.
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