Autodesk Inventor 2012

The "Use Style Library = No" option was removed from the project file settings.

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. See Figure 1: Explicitly caching a style in an Inventor document.

The two remaining Style library options in the project file are

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 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: 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 (for example: c:\Data migration datasets\empty style library) and selecting the "Create Empty Style Library" option. See Figure 4 and Figure 5.

Note: You need to copy over the clearance.xls and threads.xls from a working Design Data folder into the Design Data folder( For example: C:\Data migration datasets\empty style library ) that has empty styles.

Once you have an empty style library, point the Design Data folder(for example: C:\Data migration datasets\empty style library) in the Folder Options of your Inventor project file to this empty style library location. See Figure 6: Using a personalized or empty style library.

For additional information on creating and managing a style library, see: Style Library Manager in Autodesk Inventor Help.

Note: In conclusion and as this section, working with cached styles is not something that we advise going forward because it creates excessive files.