…and the 2D outputs from the big-boy solid modellers are a complete and utter nightmare for technical illustration outside of the package that generated it. A plethora of lines, often 10’s of thousands of the bloody things, most of them overlapping, none of them connected and very few of them automatically join-able. ‘Clean’ is the last word I’d use to describe it.
Rhino Make 2D output is on a similar level, I would venture to suggest. Perhaps the technologies employed are similar too. It’s only the smoke-and-mirrors post processing trickery of those solid modellers that makes their output appear cohesive and tidy. I suspect there’s a lot of background coding going on to keep the user at arm’s length from the actual geometry, so you never get to see how poor it is until you export the geometry alone and get to see it ‘warts and all’. But that’s true of pretty much all that those packages do, in my experience.
Just a thought - could a raster-to-vector trace of the Display be created within Rhino, as an alternative/option pipeline to Make 2D? I know Jeff Lasor has said time and again that 2D vectors can’t be made from his viewport trickery, but a vector interpretation of it would serve a lot of people well. Many of these 2D view generations are from Perspective views anyway, so mm accuracy is irrelevant as the views can’t be scaled. The over-riding goal is clean, simple geometry that has ends that join up and create closed loops where required. The output destination also has a large bearing on what the user wants created. For technical drawings, it’s Lines, Arcs and a smattering of Splines. For technical illustration or presentation graphics, the export process will convert all of the arcs to beziers anyway, as weighted points aren’t supported(?) @GregArden - that would seem to be the first fork in the road, before you get anywhere near the junction for 2D/3D associative views?
And make sure that the conversion of arcs to beziers maintains tangency with adjacent lines, if the arc was originally tangent…