P Retondo

I'd like to be able to toggle the display of wall cavities while working in viewport annotation space.

Users have reported both these things in the past as problems. The sill thing in particular is a problem, since it shows up in Section Viewports as a garbled set of lines.

Donald, if I do a T join (uncapped mode) and remove the wall that butts into the other wall, there is a gap in the wall line where the joint existed that can only be removed using the "Remove Wall Breaks" tool. You must be doing something differently. If you do a T join in capped mode, then attempt to do a cavity join in uncapped mode, you will observe something like the effect you describe. Try the different operations, and remove the "butting" wall to see what effect you've had on the crossing wall.

D, I have the same basic software as you, and haven't experienced workspace corruption in a long time. A couple of things to look at: version of Quicktime (workspaces are a .qtr file)and custom or 3rd party tools you have added.

WinDoor doors have a single 3d poly representing glass. VW window PIOs have two 3d polys. VW doors with leaf type "glass" have four 3d polys, two of which are superimposed. VW doors with leaf type "panel" where the interior and exterior panels are assigned to a glazing class have two extrusions (verified by exploding objects and checking the assigned classes).

Katie, he's referring to that red loop in the drawing below. The red bridge line and the green rectangle both belong to the same class, shown in a viewport where the red class color is set to override with green. As you can see, the override doesn't "take" with the bridge line object. Christiaan, I suspect this may have to do with the fact that the bridge line works with a white line that covers the line that "bridges." This white line must remain white for the tool to work, so it might be complicated to implement class override with this object. Or it might just be a bug.

Windows, and the different types of doors handle glazing differently in VW. One of my wishes is to have all these things standardized! Some objects have a pair of planes for glazing, some have a single plane. Some objects set the glazing opacity via class, some via a dropdown list. To get things to be consistent, if you see a dropdown list choose "by class." Set the class name by hand - you have to enter it exactly (pretend you are a programmer). Then you can use class attributes to control how glazing looks. You still won't be able to solve the problem of some glazing being a double layer. Play with it and you can get acceptable, but by no means perfect results.

Arlene, as Islandmon suggests you might have set class overrides inadvertently, or, alternatively, your viewport may have been given different lineweight and arrowhead scale factors. Check under "Advanced Properties" via the OIP and look at the various scales. These attributes can be transferred from viewport to viewport using the eydropper tool.

Sorry, typo. How difficult it is to move text depends on the dimension standard. Some, for some reason, are more tame than others. Thanks for the tip on using to constrain. But, frankly, with the current implementation this should not be necessary. To move the dimension lines, one clicks on the lines to get the resize cursor. To move the text, one clicks on the text. These are handled differently, and unless we are able to move the text relative to the dimension lines in both directions, movement should be automatically constrained without using the shift key.

When I move dimension text by dragging it, the rectanglular box indicating where the text will sit is almost always nowhere near where the text ends up after releasing the mouse button. I don't think things have to be this way. Why can't we drag text to the spot we need it to be? This is a critical capability when trying to make drawings intelligible and clear. See attached image for an example: Speaking of making this work better, it would be nice if we could also drag text in the orthogonal offset dimension (as well as being able to set the offset precisely in the OIP). It would make the workflow faster and easier. With the shift modifier key we could constrain movement to x or y. Also, when dragging the text the dimension lines themselves should stay put. I always have to do this is two steps: move the text, then reposition the dimension lines back to where they were. These things add up.

bc, you had a brilliant idea, but the engineers had already thought of it!

bc, you are missing the command. Use the key to move vertically.

Jonathan, stranger yet, I can't zoom either during either creation or editing. I'm talking about being able to do that while the text window is active and the text cursor is blinking. Whether it is using menu commands, keystrokes, or mouse wheel, none of them now work unless they act to return focus to the drawing window.

I often want to zoom in or out while editing text but can't.

Hi Katie, I tried that, but there wasn't any mode where the visible and greyed layers were grouped together at the top.

Dworks, you're right, this is the capability we want, but not every purchaser of VW has that tool.

Hi Katie, glad you like the idea - how about let's do all of the above, with a new option to display only visible or display all! Or, alternatively, maybe the sort could put all the visible layers (or classes) at the top, where we can get at them easily. The one little glitch with sort by visibility is that the grayed layers go to the bottom of the list, not what we are looking for here. Then, maybe, the key command to go to the next layer up could take us to the next visible layer up (i.e., the next layer up on the sorted list)?

I don't get the part about doing this without creating a section viewport. Why do that? Just create the section viewport at the desired angle, and your section line will be created as well. To reposition the section line endpoints, just drag them. The cursor cue "parallel" lets you know that you aren't changing the angle of the line. You should be in Top/Plan view with the "Constrain angle (S)" constraint mode on.

J, I'm responding to your rejection of the whole VW platform based on a couple of minor complaints, well-justified though they may be. Also, I'm puzzled by your complaint about the flip commands among others, which has always been stable and flawless for me. I appreciated the tenor of the original post that started this thread. It acknowledges the state of affairs with balance and awareness, and points out the shortcomings without rejecting what is an overall success. By contrast, your point of view is that the program should satisfy your every desire, otherwise no dice. I don't mean to come down on you like a ton of bricks here - what I'm saying is that an open mind is a two-way street, and advising (based on my 15 years with VW and 5 years with ACAD) that maybe you should give VW a fair shot. If you read my post in its entirety, and if you were familiar with my participation in general on this board, I don't think you could characterize my loyalty to VW as in any way blind. Same goes for Mike. From NNA's point of view, they probably think that at times we've been savage. By the way, I wouldn't be surprised if NNA were working on some of these long-standing issues. It's public knowledge that the ability to rotate plans, a la ACAD's UCS capability, is being worked on by their engineers.

I'd like to see an option to have the layer drop-down list show visible layers only. We can see all the available layers in the navigation palette now, and this option would give the drop down list a reason to exist. With long lists of layers it would be a real time saver to see only the currently relevant layers. We could set this up with a modifier key (ctrl, maybe) to toggle the option. As it is now, for a typical project the list is so long it requires scrolling to see the layers towards the bottom of the list. The scrolling is particularly slow. Having the sheet layers take up precious space at the top of this list is particularly annoying. And while we're at it, why not make that list more compact so that we can see more layers on the screen? I could easily see ten more items with less space between the lines. Also, it would be great if we could scroll the list with the mouse.

Mike, sounds more like someone trained in AutoCAD who is resisting getting used to the VectorWorks system. Not that I disagree that ACAD has at least two superior methods - move and copy by vector (you click on any two points on the screen to define the movement) and UCS, which allows the user to set up an alternative coordinate system (i.e., allows rotation of the plan to the screen and to all orthogonally defined commands). Mike, do you know if the plug-ins you recommend work in version 12.5?

Try creating a new file, and WGR your corrupt file into it. That might preserve all the objects and the layer structure. It everything comes up, break the reference and save the objects. On the other hand, even with the best outcome you won't be able to preserve any work done after your last successful save.

b, the sheet layer your viewport is on has a dpi setting. It defaults to 72 dpi, which is screen quality. Make it at least 300, and you should be happy. Right click on the sheet name in the navigation palette, -> edit.

Thanks, Brian and Pete. In answer to your questions, the VP is there, but only the annotations appear. If I update, everything shows as it should. What I expected is, with viewport cache enabled, the image from the previous update would persist. So, Brian, my problem seems to be different from yours, and you might in fact look into the questions that Pete A. raises. And Pete, since everything displays fine after updating, this seems to be an issue of VP image persistence - do your Section Viewports maintain the image (with cache enabled and after closing and opening the file)?

I have section viewports that often turn up with nothing but annotations showing, despite having selected viewport caching (and paying the price of having a 350 MB file). Does anyone else experience this? My elevation and plan viewport images persist, and this problem seems to be only with Section VP's.