Other drawing improvements

Tekla Structures
2020
Tekla Structures

Other drawing improvements

Tekla Structures 2020 also introduces improvements in displaying rebars, Rebar pull-out picture and marking, marks, Document manager, macros, curved dimensions and drawing performance.

Display rebars with overlap

  • A new advanced option XS_DRAW_REBAR_SELF_INTERSECTING_LEGS_WITH_OFFSET has been added. When set to TRUE, this advanced option displays rebars in drawings with overlap in all representations. The option filled line already showed the overlap earlier. Note that FALSE has no impact on the filled line representation. The default value is FALSE.

    XS_DRAW_REBAR_SELF_INTERSECTING_LEGS_WITH_OFFSET set to TRUE:

    XS_DRAW_REBAR_SELF_INTERSECTING_LEGS_WITH_OFFSET set to FALSE:

Rebar pull-out picture and marking

  • You can now rotate rebar pull-out pictures. The new setting Rotation of bars perpendicular to view is available on the Rebar tab. This setting affects single bars perpendicular to the view only. By default, the pull-out pictures were always placed vertically. Now you have the option to also place them horizontally.

    The new setting Custom rotation angle allows you to rotate all pull-out pictures using the same rotation angle.

  • You can now show the bending angles of the rebar pull-outs. The new setting Angle dimensions is located on the Dimensions tab.

  • Duplicate dimensions are now supported. To allow duplicate dimensioning, set PullOutShowDuplicateDims to the desired value in the rebar_config.inp file. For example, PullOutShowDuplicateDims=3 shows all dimensioning, and PullOutShowDuplicateDims=0 does not show duplicate dimensions. The default value is 0. For more informaton, see Reinforcement settings for drawings (rebar_config.inp).

Improvements in Document manager

  • The type of the attributes CC_MIN*, CC_MAX* and CC_TARGET was changed to doubles. New CC_DIAMETER_MIN/MAX* attributes were added.

  • You can now use the Ctrl+A keyboard shortcut in Document manager to select all drawings.

For more information about Document manager, see Document manager.

Updated drawing macros

  • The following macros were updated in the Common environment so that they work with either the old Drawing list or the new Document manager, depending on the value of the advanced option XS_USE_OLD_DRAWING_LIST_DIALOG:

    Clone Drawing

    Select All Drawings

    Select Assembly Drawing

    Select Parts By Drawing

    Select Single Part Drawing

    Open Shop Drawing

  • Now the Close button (X) in Document manager also works with macros.

Improvements in marks

  • Decimal feet is now available in mark properties as the unit for length, height, spacing and diameter.

  • Decimal feet is also available in mark properties in the view properties dialog boxes.
  • Non-intelligent (dummy) detail marks can now be:

    • moved using Shift+drag

    • copied using Ctrl+drag

    Note that the detail marks can only be moved or copied within a view. When moved beyond the view frame, the view frame will adjust so that the detail mark will always be within the frame.

Short extension lines for curved dimensions

  • Curved dimensions in drawings can now be drawn with short extension lines. Earlier, the Short extension line setting in dimension properties did not work for curved dimensions.

Improved drawing performance

The performance of the drawings has been improved in Tekla Structures 2020. The improvements affect

  • Drawing opening time

  • Zoom performance

  • Pan performance - dragging the drawing from one end of the screen to another

  • Drawing editing - adding add marks, text, lines, and moving views, among other things

Showing the level of detail in drawings

Starting from Tekla Structures 2020, the point at which the level of detail is reduced in drawings has been set earlier. This means that zooming out in drawings will drop drawing related detail earlier than before.

As a result, overall zooming and panning are smoother while some drawing content is simplified and some are left out when zoomed out over certain extent. The effect is easy to notice in large drawings with a high amount of content.

The change in the level of detail affects

  • Hidden lines, which are not drawn

  • Very short lines, which are not drawn

  • Hatches, which are drawn as a cloud of points

  • Text, which is replaced by a line

Tip:

For some cases using the advanced option XS_USE_SMART_PAN can further improve performance but will cause a checkerboard effect during panning operations.

To enable optimized zooming and panning in drawings, in the Advanced Options dialog box, set XS_USE_SMART_PAN to TRUE. The default setting is FALSE. Restart Tekla Structures to activate the new setting.

This advanced option is user specific and is saved in the options.bin under the user folder.

Examples

The following examples show how the hatches, hidden lines, text, and very short lines were drawn before (on the left), and how they are drawn now when the level of detail is reduced (on the right).

Hatches are now drawn as a cloud of points:

Hidden lines are no longer drawn:

Text is now replaced by lines:

Very short lines are no longer drawn:

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