Superceded drawing system?

[Babtie Dover]

I work in a small civil engineering office producing drawings with a lot of
xrefs in them. When these drawings are revised they invariably reflect
changes to the xrefs themselves plus the revision info to the title block
within the drawing itself. This is fine but when a client wishes a copy of
an old superceded drawing, I cannot reproduce it as its xrefs are now
updated!
I have considered the following systems to fix the above problem:-

1) Copy the drawing 'to be revised' to the next revision letter, then
opening the original and binding all the xrefs at that moment into the
drawing for archiving. However this would produce a huge archive storage
problem after a while!

2) Produce a PLT file of the drawing 'to be revised'.

Is there a better way to manage this problem?

Is there any software which will convert a .PLT file to a .DWG file?

Thanks in advance
Dean Barkley

[TomD]

I work in civil as well. We use PLT files for 'legacy' versions of
drawings. Actually, we keep one DWF and one PLT of each 'official' plot.
As you mentioned, archiving of entire drawing sets isn't typically an
elegant solution.

There are a number of utilities for converting PLTs, but I've never used
them, so I can't speak to how well they work. If you search back through
this group, you should be able to find plenty of links and information on
that topic.

Babtie Dover <babtie...@talk21.com> wrote in message
news:9kbu41$gus$1...@plutonium.btinternet.com...

[Rishards]

Using your backup system (assuming you have one in place) you do weekly
complete backups and daily changed drawing backups. Look at the plot stamp
date and TADA! Maybe its time to invest in backups. If enough old requests
are made AND you charge for pulling from archives, you might have a new
revenue stream.

"TomD" <nospam.dc...@stargate.net> wrote in message
news:tmj17dd...@corp.supernews.com...

[TomD]

IMO, the PLT file method is better than tape backup. We do have a backup
system in place as well as an archive system. The fact of the matter is
that it is not feasible to keep a full DWG file for every revision to a
drawing. Our clients don't often request legacy versions of drawings. When
they do, the PLT is more than adequate for our needs.

As always, it depends on your exact circumstances.

If you are trusting tapes alone with your livelihood, beware. Have you ever
seen a snapped tape? Not a pretty site.

Rishards <ric...@structuralsupport.net> wrote in message
news:9kcqe5$17fv$1...@allthetime.news.cais.net...

[jo...@fel.u-net.com.invalid]

I'm now recommending pdf (acrobat) files for this situation.

John B

johnbogie btinternet.com
Put the "at" in the gap.