Matthew Giampapa

mickey, On Windows there is a issue with the v4.61 drivers for the 455CA that causes patterns to print as solid black. The solution is to use the v4.40 or v4.60 drivers instead. If you are using a Mac, are you using the HP RIP software, or another 3rd party program like MacPlot? Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support

I never claimed to be an artist...

Bitmap depth is the number of bits used to store the color information for each pixel. 1 bit is black and white only. 8 bit is 256 colors. 16 bit is 65536 colors. 2 raised the # of bits = # number of colors. The trade off is size. depending on the number of horizontal and vertical pixels in the image. Each one take that many bits of space. So a 200 x 200 image at 8 bits would be 312.5kb, while the same 200 x 200 image at 32 bit would be 1.25mb. Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support

The version 9 spiral object would have to be rewritten to accommodate the feature you want. But you can place one of approximate size and ungroup it. This will turn it into a polyline with a whole bunch of straight segments. Which can be filtered down as described above. Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support

GUSTAF, There are a few approaches you can take. I'm assuming that your spiral is either made of arcs or polyline objects. 1) Use the convert to polygon command in the tool menu and then use the object information pallet or 2D reshape tool to remove extra points and straighten the lines. 2) Trace the spiral using the polygon tool by hand. 3) Write a simple VectorScript to find points along the spiral and connect them. (John Williams' simplify poly script may be a good place to start, or very helpful with #1. Get is at http://www.aetherlumina.com/vw/. Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support

Doug, Well, we have not seen any increase in the number of corrupted file calls since 10.2 has been available. So if the cause of this was 10.2, then it has not been widespread. Typically a file corruption problem happens when VectorWorks or the machine crashes while doing a disk operation. I'll also be the first to admit that there are a number of things that can cause VW to crash on 10.2. If I had to place a wager on the problem, this is where I would put my $. We currently know that revert to saved causes intermittent problems on some systems. For instance, it will crash my copy of VectorWorks every time, but on another machine in testing we can't get it to crash with that command at all. All I can do at the moment is assure you that all of the crashing bugs are being looked into. We only have a beta version available for 10.2 at the moment. If you are doing production work on this machine, I can't recommend that you use VectorWorks natively under 10.2 because of the possibility of these problems. If you want to take this risk, you are welcome to. Otherwise I would suggest booting into OS 9, or only running VW on MacOS X 10.1 - 10.1.5 until 9.5.3 is declared final. Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support

Pedro, It is quite possible to have more than one class, but at the moment there is no way to set dimension lines to come into a class other than "Dimension". Your certainly welcome to move them to a different class afterwards, but there is now way to get them into the active class automatically. This is a very high priority wish list item and is on our radar for the near future, but it will not be a 10.0 feature. Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support

VW does not support QTVR directly. However you can use the Set 3D View tool to take a number of rendered shots from the same location, and stitch them into a QTVR movie using existing tools. (I'm thinking of the Panorama Style QTVR shots... I never attempted to make one for a rotatable object. That may require something like 3DMF export which was dropped after version 8.) Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support [ 09-06-2002: Message edited by: Matthew Giampapa ]

Yes. If you do not have Classic MacOS installed, you will be unable to run the VectorWorks installer from version 9.0.X. Please call our customer service line, or your local distributor about getting a new CD sent out. (1-888-646-4223) N.B. VectorWorks must be installed on a HFS or HFS+ disk. We do not support running VW on a UFS volume. Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support

This is due to a driver incompatibility with windows 2000/XP and the 1220C. On Windows XP you need to use the built in driver from MS, and on Windows 2000 you must use the version 1.2 driver from HP. There are a number of applications having the same problem as VectorWorks with these drivers. Word and Adobe Illustrator also are affected by the same bug. http://bizforums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0x86d199f08a51d61190040090279cd0 f9,00.html Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support

Joe, It's not the demo, it's the video card. At home I used a Radion All in Wonder and found it unbearable in VectorWorks. There is some problem that causes the program to redraw at a sluggish pace. Try using a later Radion or a nVidia card. Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support

It's a hold over from pre MiniCAD 7 at least. As far as I can tell, it would change the data being displayed in the Data Display Bar in case all of the information would not fit on a small monitor. Eventually, the small expanding arrow was added to the bar to make this obsolete. So while this option has been dead for some time, it will finally be buried in the next version. Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support

I tried to use the 12x9 inch Intuos for a little while with some success. However, VectorWorks is not a pressure sensitive application so I just found myself using the mouse features of the tablet instead. I did find it extremely useful for converting paper drawings to CAD drawings. The ability to fit a whole 8.5x11 page on the drawing surface is so useful. Eventually, I just got rid of the tablet and got a nice wireless optical mouse from Logitech... (Just a personal opinion)Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support

If you deselect all of your object (click on the background of your drawing), you can set the document default line weight by using the attribute pallet. Once the default is set, then every new object drawn or class created will take that as it's value. Of course, you still have to change the existing classes. Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support

To my knowledge we have not had over a 20 minute hold time in the last 3 weeks. Be sure that you call during business hours, 9-5 Eastern Standard Time. If you call at the end of the day and do not get answered by 5:15, there is a possibility that you will get stuck in the phone system and not be directed to a voice mailbox. The department is regularly closed from 10-11 on Tuesdays and Thursdays when we have a department meeting / training. When these events are going on calls are either answered by our operator and you get a call back after the meeting, or are diverted to customer service if it is an issue they can handle. Technical Support is a toll call because it would not be feasible to provide 18 months of free technical support otherwise. (In actuality we almost never enforce the 18 month rule. All copies of VectorWorks 8 are currently past their 18 months and will be supported actively until VectorWorks 10 is on the market) If you do not wish to pay the cost of the phone call, you may also email us, fax us, or use regular mail. In the future we hope to provide other avenues of live technical support over the internet, and are currently evaluating different options. International customers should be contacting their local distributor for technical support as it is part of their obligation to you. (Yes, this includes Canada and the UK.) A non-official way to reach technical support is by this message board and our internet mailing list. We try to keep an eye on both, but can not guarantee that we will be able to respond to an issue in these forums. Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support

We can't recommend that one because it is pirated software. PDFWriter is a component of the commercial Adobe Acrobat package. Also, PDF writer has a number of text issues with VectorWorks. Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support

There are a lot of factors that come into play here. A normal CSG solid (Addition, subtraction, intersection) stores the entire history of an object. Each time you perform one of these operations, the two objects used to create it are also stored inside. If you have a lot or repeated solids operations on one object, you can build up a lot of redundant information. A Mesh, 3D Polygon, or Nurbs based object just stores it's 3D geometry. These will have a minimum size. In addition to this, VectorWorks itself will generate a cache of all the 3D geometry in your file. This is done for performance reasons, otherwise each CSG solid would have to be recalculated every time you changed views or opened the file. The cache itself can take up a large amount of space as well. Complex 3D symbols use 1 instance of the geometry, but I believe these are cached separately. This is why multiple instances will cause a increase in file size. So the bottom line is this... if you want small file sizes, you should compress the file as a .zip or a .sit. Who knows, at some point in the future we may include file level compression built in. Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support

We are currently looking into issues with the MacHASP dongles and MacOS 10.2. At this point we suggest that anyone using a dongle protected version of VectorWorks not update to 10.2 just yet, and wait for the all clear. We will put more information here as soon as we have it. Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support

We are currently looking into issues with the MacHASP dongles and MacOS 10.2. At this point we suggest that anyone using a dongle protected version of VectorWorks not update to 10.2 just yet, and wait for the all clear. We will put more information here as soon as we have it. Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support

As of Friday afternoon (8/23/02) you can download 9.5.3b1 here. (http://www.nemetschek.net/downloads/vectorworks/index.html) Keep checking this location for more recent versions until a final release is made. Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support [ 08-25-2002: Message edited by: Matthew Giampapa ]

Kevin, the script changes a preference in the program that reduces the number of lines that appear on curved surfaces with line based rendering. Antone, I think only Andrew knows why it hasn't made it in yet, but it should be making an appearance in the future. Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support

If you have VectorWorks Architect, you can draw your walls with the "Wall Type" tool, this automatically places a wall record on the wall with the information you want. Architect also will create the worksheets to pull this information off the file for you. Please note, that the wall records are only updated when the "VA Create Schedule" command is run, so be sure to re-run this command after you make changes to your walls. Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support

Well, according to the big count down on Apple's home page, there are about 4 hours until 10.2 is officially out there. I'm sure there is going to be a formal announcement about this soon, but you can now download a public beta version of 9.5.3. http://www.nemetschek.net/downloads/vectorworks/9.5.3_page.html At the moment, this is Macintosh only, and addresses the issues with MacOS X 10.2 and QuickTime 6. Please let us know if you encounter any problems with this updater, or if you see any new problems that do not happen in 9.5.2. Remember, this is a beta release. It may have unexpected problems. We are making this available for users who want to update to 10.2 right away. In the near future there will be a final release of 9.5.3 which will be suitable for installing on machines that do real work. Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support

The line based renderers (not OpenGL or RenderWorks) have a smoothing angle as a hidden preference. You can adjust it between 0-90 to remove extra lines from curved surfaces. Here is an example script to let you adjust this. {----------Begin VectorScript--------}Procedure SetSmoothingAngle; VARangle, newAngle : REAL; BEGINangle := GetPrefReal(72);newAngle := RealDialog('Enter new smoothing angle in degrees', Num2Str(1, angle));if angle <> newAngle then SetPrefReal(72, newAngle);END; Run(SetSmoothingAngle);{----------End VectorScript--------} Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support [ 08-23-2002: Message edited by: Matthew Giampapa ]

There is a patch in development for 9.5.X and OS 10.2 compatibility. We aren't trying to be negative with Apple, but we have written our program to work on their new system and with each update they have managed to break something. QuickTime 6 broke image exports while the QuickTime 6 betas did not. 10.1.4 broke our installer.10.1.5 broke some core color handling code.10.2.0 broke a portion of our screen drawing code. We understand that OS X is a new system, but it is a trend we are not happy with.