How to make a part of path dotted?

I use it pretty much every day, and don't find it to be too onerous. The frustration I have with Graphic Styles is often finding their inheritance behavior unreliable, and they tend to duplicate too often, so I'm frequently clearing the Graphic Styles palette of auto-generated repeats.

My habit in exploded diagrams (regardless of the program I'm using) is to dedicate a separate layer named "Callouts" above the artwork layer(s). That lets me lock the artwork layer(s), so I can I add and cut and move all the leaders and callouts without selecting the artwork.

Both my graphic styles consist of two strokes: the narrow weight solid or dashed stroke, and a wider weight white stroke behind it. That creates what is commonly called a "halo" which helps avoid visually confusing the leader lines with object edges in the artwork, and I find also helps with the "behind" appearance of hidden portions. (Same principle as the "halo" treatment to create breaks between separate objects which sometimes have to partially overlap.)

So in the overall workflow, I arrange all the elements of the explosion before adding any leaders or callouts. Only after the arrangement is pretty much nailed down for space efficiency and clarity do I start adding leader lines on the dedicated layer. I find this reasonably expedient.

But the idea of a stroke feature that would do exactly what you want is a good one. It would be powerful for much more than just hidden lines. I personally would find it much more useful than Illustrator's on-page "variable stroke weight" settings. And I dare say it would probably be less involved to implement. I think I'll start recommending it to vendors of software that I will not rent. ;-)

It's related to a group of continual frustrations I've always had over one of Illustrator's actual competitive advantages: Its Brushes implementation. It took a long time for Art Brushes to gain the ability to restrict the stretching of the base art to distances inboard of a path's endpoints. But that adjustment has to be done in the Brush's modal dialog; it can't be adjusted on the individual paths, on the page. And, of course, for the purpose of hidden line portions of a path, it wouldn't serve anyway, because you often need more than one hidden portion of a "single" leader line. So you would need to be able to set as many "key points" as needed on a per-path basis, just as you can set as many stroke weight markers, independent of the position of the path nodes.

JET