How to preserve cached styles in Inventor 2012?

In 2012 we removed the "Use Style Library = No" option from the project file settings.

This means that starting from 2012 , on open, we automatically purge all styles from Inventor documents if the style matches a style in the style library.
The result is a smaller Inventor document size and increased capacity. It also allows us to provide more nimble template files.

The “Styles Library = No” option was provided in 2004 (Inventor R9) to give customers time to migrate from Inventor R8 document styles to using the style library. 

Of course we continue to cache a style after it has been used,  modified or explicitly copied in an Inventor document, like in the past.
So, there should be no issues opening Inventor documents when the style library that created them is not present.

 

Figure 1: Explicitly caching a style in an Inventor document

The two remaining Style library options in the project file are

• Use Style Library = Read-Write (previously called Use Style Library = Yes)
• Use Style Library = Read-Only

The Read-Write option uses the style library that is defined in the style library folder options. The library is writable so all users can create and edit the styles and save them to the style library, replacing previous style definitions.

The Read-Only option prohibits users from saving new and changed styles to the style library. Library definitions cannot be replaced. 

We highly recommend that only the CAD manager uses the Read-Write open for creating your company style library.  All other uses of the Style Library should be Read-Only. 

When you open legacy Inventor files that contain cached styles that differ from the style library, you will see this dialog :

 

Figure 2: Inventor detects a customized style that is different from the style with the same name in the style library

But in case you intend to use the second option as proposed in the dialog, how exactly do you "remove styles" from your style library without running into all kind of other error messages like illustrated in Figure 3?

 

Figure 3: Missing style library error dialog

If you want to continue to keep all your styles cached in your templates, you can create an empty style library using the Style Library Manager by pointing to a new folder e.g. c:\temp\my styles and selecting the "Create Empty Style Library" option.

 

Figure 4: Creating an empty style library in Inventor's Style Library Manager

Once you have an empty style library, point the Design Data folder in the Folder Options of your Inventor project file to this empty style library location.

 

Figure 5: Using a personalized  or empty style library

For additional information on creating and managing a style library, see: http://wikihelp.autodesk.com/Inventor/enu/2012/Help/0073-Autodesk73/0684-Collabor684/0725-Tools725/0731-Style_Li731

In conclusion and as this long article illustrates,  working with cached styles is not something that we advise going forward because it creates file bloat.

Comments

[Bob]

In addition we found out that creating an empty style library with the described method also creates empty clearance.xls and threads.xls files.
This has the unwanted side-effect that threadded holes are no longer possible until you copy over the clearance.xls and threads.xls from a working Design Data folder into the the Design Data folder that has empty styles. Just wanted to let you know.

Bob

[U. Nagel]

Hallo Bob, that can´t be true!
We have hundreds of projects provided with the “Styles Library = No” option!

It works very fine, each project is stand alone, in itself closed and works with another styles. To work with a central "Styles Library" is not possible for us and our customers. They all work with the same system.

With the new Autodesk variant we must administer a "Styles Library" in each project and not with a template file(300kb)!

For us is no relief, but additional expenditure.

Thanks for the information.