2D CAD improvements?

[Doug Park]

What you are referring to as parametric documentation is also referred to as Building Information Modeling (BIM). BIM is a marketing term coined by one of the big CAD firms to describe something that was new to them but precisely describes what we had been doing for many years before they got into it. Namely it means that information is gleaned from the 3D model to produce other things, such as elevations, layouts, material lists, schedules, etc.

Parametric modeling simply means that a more complicated item such as a window is created from simpler parameters. In the simplest case a window is defined by the width and height parameters. As the parametric model becomes more robust the number of parameters increases, but instead of specifying it as a collection of 3D objects you use parameters that make more sense from a window centric point of view, like number of lites, trim width, etc.