Detailed Drawings > Detailed Drawings Basics > View-Only Drawings > About View-Only Mode
  
About View-Only Mode
If you simply want to view or quickly check a drawing, you can reduce the amount of time it takes to retrieve it by opening it in View-Only mode.
In View-Only mode, the system does not retrieve any of the associated model files when it opens the drawing. However, since the solid models are not in session, the system temporarily freezes the drawings, so you cannot modify them.
A prerequisite to using view only mode is that the configuration option save_display is set to yes the last time the file is saved in normal mode. This lets the drawing file "remember" the 3D dimension locations and values without having to access the 3D model files.
If you decide that you do need to modify a drawing in view only mode, you can use Layout > Retrieve Models to retrieve all of the models in mid-session.
 
If the geometry display information of a view is missing, the system displays an empty view boundary.
Since the system does not retrieve any of the associated solid models, plotting (for example, complex overlap checking) does not function the same way that it does in Drawing mode because much of the information is missing.
If you store the display with snap lines in Drawing mode, the system plots them in View-Only mode.