Delayed ribbon commands and slow performance when using XRefs in AutoCAD products

Autodesk Support

Aug 5, 2024

Products and versions covered

Issue:

When drawing attached as Xref the performance drops down, mouse movement becomes jittery and ribbon command delays occur in AutoCAD.

Causes:

  • Corrupt Text style fonts. One or more fonts displayed incorrectly in the drawing.
  • Text styles imported from third party applications. 

Solution:

Try one or more of the following to increase the performace:

Cleaning the Text Styles

By deleting all the unneeded text styles, and replacing the fonts with one of the standard fonts on the system such as ARIAL.

To rebuild the Text Styles and reassign fonts to them, do the following:

If all the MText, Text objects are displayed according to text styles.  

For each Text Style, substitute the font temporarily to a different one. 
  1. Open Style Manager STYLE (Command). 
  2. Substitute the font for each style temporarily.
    1. If the original font is SHX font, then change it to a TTF one.
    2. If the original font is already a TTF font, then still change it to a different one. 
  3. Save the changes and OK to exit the style.
  4. Test the performance. 
  5. Open the Style Manager again and reset the fonts to their original ones if necessary. 
 

If all the MText objects are displayed according to their own embedded styling.  

  1. Create temporary Text Styles for each style in the drawing.
    1. Use the available selection methods (SELECTSIMILAR, QSELECT, FILTER) to isolate similar MText objects in groups.
    2. Explode the MText to Text.
    3. Apply one of the temporary Text Styles to these Text object.
  2. Repeat for all the other MText objects.
  3. Delete the original Text Styles 
  4. Rename the temporary Text Style with their respective original ones.
Note:
Dimensions also use text style. Sometimes the cause of the problem can be a Dimension style, which is using a faulty Text Style.

Using QTEXTMODE

By changing the value of QTEXTMODE variable to 1 will turn the quick-text mode on. You need to use REGEN to redraw the viewport. In this mode Text objects are displayed as boundary boxes only, making the drawing much lighter and easier to navigate.

Using Layer Management

By arranging the different object types on different layers, this will allow to toggle these objects on or off easier.

Managing External References

  • Using the External References, it will be better to unload the unnecessary xrefs while working on certain tasks, and only reload them before going for printing or publishing.

  • Avoid placing the content at very high coordinates. 

Additional possibilities to improve the performance

  • Dock the command line if you have it floating.
  • Turn off Transparency in the palettes.
  • Turn off Dynamic Input by setting DYNMODE variable = 0 (zero).

Products:

AutoCAD Products;

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