Michael,

Yes, we agree this would be ideal.
We have this documented here:
https://www.landfx.com/index.php/docs/planting/planting-getting-started/item/996-exclude-shrubs.html#exclude_shrubs_not_working
We were hoping to avoid the multiple Region subtraction and addition operations that would be necessary to do this. Consider if there were dozens of shrubs that crossed the boundary line -- in that case, it could cause a significant pause as it figured out what to do with each.
So for now, we took the easier, faster route. I'll look into this again, and see if something might be possible in the near future.

--J

I have a workaround that seems to work most of the time. It may work because AutoCAD has improved how its HATCH command works. Not really sure, but I can describe and maybe it informs how the tool could be programmed.

1) Draw a hatch boundary that intersects shrubs.
2) Run HATCH command.
3) Choose "Add: Pick Points" in the Hatch and Gradient window.
4) Select empty space between shrubs and hatch boundary to generate hatch.
5) Place ground cover and select the new hatch to replace.

I feel like the pick points feature used to not work as well, but I've had better luck in the newer versions of CAD.

Michael,

I tried this out, and it's still "analyzing the selected data." I think I killed AutoCAD.
Yeah, the pick points is still not very reliable.
But even if it wasn't, your step 4 is very challenging to convert to code -- how to tell a computer to look for "empty space."

I poked around with a process that could work, something like this:
- select all shrubs within polyline, and separately select all shrubs crossing polyline
- convert bounding polyline to Region object
- for each shrub crossing but not within boundary, subtract from boundary region
- explode boundary region, PEDIT pieces and join back to polyline

That seems to work! But as you might guess, it has its own drawbacks -- notably, it forcibly alters the bounding polyline, so that if one of the crossing shrubs was later deleted, its exclusion arc is still a part of the boundary. The only way around this, would be to subtract the outer portion of the intersecting shrub from the outer polyline, and then subtract *that* from the shrub region. So that too, could totally work, it would just chug a little bit if there were a lot of intersecting shrubs. So.... interesting!
Okay, I'll mark up the wishlist request with my testing notes, and see when we might be able to implement this.

--J

That sounds great! Even if we ended up with the method that would require manually healing the boundary if a shrub were deleted, it would be a huge time-saver.