Matthew Giampapa

Kristen, Thanks for sending the files so fast. The problem you are encountering is actually a bug with our wall objects. Something you are doing when working with them is causing them not to re-draw correctly. The wall does not even know there is a hole. The best way to fix it is to either nudge the wall in a direction and then back again, or to select the wall and click on the reverse sides button (twice) in the object info pallet. There are actually a number of things you can do, just about any interaction with the wall will cause it to draw correctly. However, simply double clicking the pan tool, or zooming will not. I've entered a bug about the problem, but to ensure that it gets fixed, I need to find a way to reproduce it here. Any suggestions? Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support

I think your going about this in the best way. The only other way that seems feasible is some acrobatics involving the stitch and trim commands. The ability to "thicken" a nurbs surface is already on the wish list and should be part of a future major release. Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support

JNR or Kristen, The next time you see this happen, could you save a copy of the file and email it to tech@nemetschek.net? Just put a red rectangle or something around the area where the stubborn hole is so we can find it. It is not something that I can remember seeing before. Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support

Bryan, VectorWorks is not fully compatible with QuickTime 6.0. Please read this for more info http://www.nemetschek.net/support/technotes/056.htm Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support [ 08-19-2002: Message edited by: Matthew Giampapa ]

Sorry, I meant to get back to this sooner... Just like a regular straight wally, curved walls can be reshaped using the 3D reshape tool. All I did was draw the staircase and draw a curved wall. (in arc by 3 point mode) I then went to an elevation view and used the 3D reshape tool to bring one of the corners of the wall up to the staircase. The only thing to remember is that the wall must be selected when you switch to the 3D reshape tool. As for the images, anyone can do those, you just have to have a graphics file hosted on a webserver somewhere. Click the "Image" button for the UBB Code required. Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support

Apple has announced that Mac OS 10.2 (Jaguar) will become widely available in the near future (on or before Aug 24). Apple has included changes in this release which cause VectorWorks 9.5.2 to fail to function properly. Known failures under MacOS X 10.2 include interactive screen drawing leaving unintended pixels behind, instability during printing, and inability to export correct image files. Apple is aware of these problems and is working closely with NNA to help develop a patch for VectorWorks which will work around these bugs in 10.2. Nemetschek North America advises users of VectorWorks products to avoid updating to MacOS X 10.2 until NNA can identify workarounds for these problems and release a compatibility update. The VectorWorks 9.5.2 product line and MacOS X 10.1.5 continue to work well together. We will release additional information about this as soon as we have more information. -------------------------------------------- Sean FlahertyChief Technology OfficerNemetschek North America7150 Riverwood DriveColumbia, MD 21046Tel.: 410.290.5114 - 614mailto:sean@nemetschek.net

Yes, this makes it impossible to run a script automatically when you open a file. Generally speaking the best solution I know is to have a menu command that "touches" the PIO and causes it to regenerate. Hopefully we will have a better solution for this type of problem in a future version of VectorWorks. Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support

Make sure it is set to a "Solid" fill on the attribute pallet. 3D objects with a "None" fill will show up exactly as you describe. Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support

I'm not exactly sure what you mean, something like this? Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support

It's not an official answer since my VS skills haven't ranged into that area. This would be a better question for vs_support@nemtschek.net. Most PIOs I have seen always draw both the 2D and 3D environments in their main loop. So unless you find a way to exclude the 3D code from being executed in a top/plan view, then your additional 3D code will slow down drawing a bit. I would put in some code and measure the amount of time it take with and without it using GetTickCount(). Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support

Both Tekton and Mr. Hand are commercial fonts, I don't think they are available for free anywhere. Tekton comes in flavors by both Adobe and Linotype, you can see an example HERE. Mr. Hand can bee seen HERE along with some other good fonts. As for the VW Print Checkboxes her is a list of what they do... Print Postscript only... Only send PS code to the printer instead of sending PS code with an additional Raster image. It's faster this way, and some weird printers will choose the low resolution raster image when presented with both. This box should no do anything if you are not using a PostScript printer. Enable special processing for transparent color bitmaps... PostScript does not understand what transparency is, so if you have any imported images in your file where you set the fill to none, (A none fill on an image makes white pixels transparent) a normal PostScript printer would keep printing them as while. This box will trick the printer by looking at VW's screen output for the image area. Disable Driver text rotation.... This preprocess text blocks in VectorWorks so the printer does not have to think about them. It frequently will clear up all kinds of printer and driver specific text problems. (Including scrunched text, odd spacing, mirrored text, and other errors) Print current view... This tells VectorWorks to disregard the layer scale and try to fit exactly what is visible on the screen onto a single sheet of paper. Glad to help,Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support

Well if you have the 3D PowerPack installed you can do this... 1) Convert the 3D Polys to Nurbs Surfaces (Select a 3D poly, Model menu -> Create Surface from Curves)2) After all the 3D polys are converted (A script is in order if you have a lot of 3D polys) Select all the Nurbs surfaces and use the "Add Solid" command to turn them into a single object. While the resulting object will have join lines in wireframe mode, it will texture as a single surface. Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support

If it is going to be a Windows machine, just make sure that it does not have WinME (Millennium Edition) installed. You are much better off getting a model with Windows 2000 or Windows XP. Actually VectorWorks 8 has a habit of taking 100% of CPU usage under Windows. If you are going to use the laptop unplugged, you may want to consider getting VectorWorks 9 as your battery will last a lot longer. Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support

Quite frequently the "Disable driver text rotation" checkbox in the print dialog will also fix this. NNA provides a free font for both Mac and Windows called Archie. Otherwise the most popular fonts appear to be Tekton and Mr. Hand. Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support

Yes there will be a file format change, but this will be more of an evolutionary change than the 8->9 transition was. We don't think there will be any problems working with VectorWorks 9 files. Just like 9, it will translate files on the fly as you open them as well as provide a scripting interface to convert batches of files. Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support

From a technical standpoint, importing the text as an EPS file should be a lot more space efficient than importing it as an image. (Assuming that you didn't put a raster preview on the EPS to begin with) Also, the EPS graphic will print out at full resolution on a Postscript printer. Yes, we are working on better native text formatting. Matthew GiampapaNemetschek Technical Support

This is fixed in the next major release, sorry for the inconvenience. You could press the space bar to hot-switch to pan tool, make your change and go back to the tool you were using. Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support

It wasn't tested a lot... It specificly tries to update all plug in objects in a document (unless they are part of a symbol) It should work for any Data Stamp object as long as it is from version 9 or later. It won't do anythign to ones from version 8. If you want, the script inside is unlocked and you can make changes if need be. Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support

Oh, since they don't have any instructions with them... extract the two .vsm files and put them in your Plug-Ins folder. Then add the menu commands to your workspace, they should be in the Misc section of the Workspace editor.

In my spare time I wrote two small menu commands to do this for another customer. You can download them here... Mac and Windows Technical Support is not in the business of writing scripts, so don't count these as official NNA products. I hope they help,Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support

Dual CPU rendering support will hopefully be a near future feature. Dual CPU support in general for all operations is a lot farther off. This is only an estimate, not an official NNA statement Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support

All in good time... We're stong willed in Tech Support so your Jedi mind tricks won't work on us... You might be able to get some info out of our Sales department. Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support

Actually, some of the later drivers may change this. Since your dilemma a while back we bought a G450 and our OpenGL developer is still using it. Admittedly she does not use it for a dual head machine, but I just enabled dual display on it (As a single extended display) and went into OpenGL mode without a crash. Try updating your drivers again from the Matrox site and give it another try. (It's that or it could be the fact that she was running a development copy of VW 10 at the time) Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support

You need specify what's broken first. Hatches should be printing correctly from VW 9 with black background. Typically to check something like this we need, OS / VW version / Printer / Driver version. Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support

Well VectorWorks Architect includes a mullion tool that places individual mullions. (Look on the objects pallet stacked with the window tools) Otherwise I would just draw the profile from above and use the extrude command. Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support [ 08-09-2002: Message edited by: Matthew Giampapa ]