Purge and Bind

Have tried issuing the commands, and then pressing F1? You get context sensitive help with any command that way.

hows it going jmex i havent heard of "bind" before, but i do know that in autocad the command purge deletes all or selected objects which arent used in the drawing. e.g. if you make lots of layers and draw a line in one of them and perform a purge then the layers without the line can be potentially deleted.

in short purging a drawing after its finished can reduce the size of the file.

Purge is described pretty well below. Bind is a term that can be applied to an external reference or xref... an xref insertion is similiar to the process of inserting a block from outside of the drawing except the xref has it's own layers,,, doesn't explode.. and generally can't be edited in the drawing. The more interesting feature of an xref is that someone can work on the original xref file while you have the xref of it in your drawing.. enables one station to keep track of an other file's work. When you bind an xref.. you turn it into a block in your drawing but the connectivity with the other file is gone. Hope this helps.

Can you get the layers if you then explode the block?

Happy Trails To You

Im not sure if I understand you exactly but I think your asking whether the layer names stay unique when you bind the xref (turning it into a block) and explode the resulting block. It depends upon whether you use the "bind" option (yes the layers are preceded with a $ sign and the drawing from which they came) or the "insert" option (in which case the drawing name and the | symbol are removed. If you happen to have layers in the drawing whose name are the same.. the layers of the bound and exploded block will take on the properties of the resident layers.)

Advantage of bind: layers stay uniquely named (although long) Advantage of insert: reduce the number of layers in your drawing.

Hope this helps.