cberg

Katie and Peter, I should have mentioned that I am working mostly in 2-D, not using the 3-D functionality of the program. We usually select the wall as an object and then apply the hatch, (quicker) instead of editing the wall and apply a hatch in the cavity function. I see how it works the other way.

Hmmm... Katie, I noticed that only the cavities in walls disappear when you use the preference that you mentioned. I was more interested in eliminating the hatches associated with those walls/elements. Will have to stick with my method for now.

Thanks! That's helpful. I have also found that if I scale the hatches very large in a viewport, by something like by 10000, they also tend not to show up. Your way is better for walls.

Perhaps this should be cross posted in the Wish List Discussion Area, because I don't think there is a good way to do this, but I'll ask. Does anybody know of a good way to control hatches within viewports? Yeah I know there is a dialogue box in the viewport's advanced properties that allows you to scale hatches. But I was wondering whether there is a good way to control whether the viewport shows hatches or not. For instance: In a building section, it would be great if the same drawing could be used for the overall building section as well as the details/wall sections. Rather than duplicate lines walls and information, it would be great to be able to turn all hatches off at one scale, and allow them to be shown at another scale. If anybody has ideas for how to do this it would be appreciated. Thanks!

I've trying out how to figure out how to use the modify classes and layer command to merge two classes. I have read that several others have had the same question, but the explanations didn't offer up much help. Does anybody know how to do this? It seems when I try to do this that the okay button continues to be grayed out, I don't think the classes are empty. Appreciate any help that could be offered.

Alan, I would prefer being able to pan by just holding down the mouse wheel button, but that is possible but clunky for other reasons. Moreover, the space bar is much easier to find than the option key which unless I put a piece of tape over it, is impossible to find. I always have to think about this option key, and moving through a drawing, I would much prefer to think about something else, like, say, my design... I guess I would like the mouse to be able to do all the maneuvering through the drawing, and the keyboard commands to do all the drawing/modeling operations. Seems logical, time efficient and intuitive at the same time. It also frees up your non-mouse hand for keyboard commands, which, believe me, I do make much use of. That's just my opinion, and I know we all approach programs differently.

Alan, I'll have to look more closely at that last post. Settings are different for the mac. My question for you and for the Nemetschek team is this. The function of zooming in and out of any architectural drawing seems far more important than being able to scroll up and down the page, which I find to be a relatively useless function when I can just hold down the space bar and pan around, and when you need to hold down a separate key to move right or left. Why not allow the wheel to default to zoom in and out, or better yet, give us the option to do this. If we were to take a poll, I bet most people would prefer using the wheel without keyboard intervention to zoom in and out, than the current arrangement. I know other programs require mouse and keyboard commands together, sometimes in even more awkward combinations. This does not make them good either. I dunno, maybe this is technically very difficult to do. I can't imagine how it could be as other programs seem to do this. But then again, I'm not a software engineer. Is this something the Nemetschek folks are working on? cberg

I have been following the discussion about using the mouse scroll wheel to zoom in and out in Vector Works drawings. I too find it clunky and irritating to have to hold down the option key to use the scroll wheel. (I am using Mac OSX) It would be a lot more natural not to have to fumble over the keyboard to use this function. Sadly my mouse a Logitech 310 4-Button Mouse does not allow me to program holding down the option key while scrolling. It may seem a trivial matter to Vectorworks tech folks, but it makes a big difference to the day to day use of the program. Thanks, cberg

Robert Thanks again for your help. I was able to produce a viewport without any bounding lines, by establishing a viewport class with all the line attributes turned to none. That class needed to be active when I created the viewport. Correct me if I am wrong, but it seems that once a viewport is created, you can't go back and turn off these bounding box lines. I like by the way, the idea of making notes in the viewport space. It allows you to move notes and text without effort, within and between sheet layers. cberg.

Thanks! I will try that. Is there any way to turn off the Viewport bounding box line so that it doesn't print?

So... I was intially thrilled with the changes to VW 11. The addition of viewports seemed to *finally* allow Vector Works to do things that most other CAD programs were able to do eons ago. But as I got to understand the new features I became a bit more frustrated. There are some issues, which I would like to mention, and perhaps others have can offer suggestions. If one is working on a drawing with multiple viewports with multiple scales, there is the issue where to place the drawing markers/labels. If the whole point of the viewports is to allow one to work in a design space all of one scale and then develop views into this drawing in the 'paper space' of a sheet layer then the program should allow some flexibility with respect to scale of the drawing label objects (ie those object that tell you what the title and scale of your drawing.) Right now the scale of these markers isn't editable in either design space or sheet layer space. It would be nice not to have to convert them to groups to work with these smart objects. Second, for the viewport feature to be really useful, this feature should be able to work in Design Layers as well as Sheet Layers. It would be akin to x-refs in Autocad or References in Microstation. When multiple people are working on multiple drawing files that are continuously being updated, (common in larger projects) it is ever so useful to link these files for design reference, ie plans to sections. Viewports offer the flexibilty that Workgroup Referencing never allowed, ie the flexibility to move and rotate the referenced information. But right now they only work in paper space. Anyway, just some feedback, and hopefully you will continue to improve this feature.

When editing hatches in large 2-D drawing files, I have also come across a problem with Vector Works 9.0 freezing up and crashing my Mac OS 9 computer at times. This generally happens when a hatch that is being edited is in use by other elements. While this problem can be alleviated by only editing hatches in the 'hatch resource file', it would be nice if this were not to occur. Has anybody else come across this problem?

Working in Vector Works version 9.0, I have been having troubles with the trim command in relatively large 2-D drawing files (3-5+MB). When I draw 2 intersecting lines and use the trim command, instead of trimming, one line will disappear. I have been forced to use the less useful split tool. In smaller files, or brand new files this problem seems to disappear. Has anybody else come across this problem? And if so, is there a workaround? We have heard that the new patch 9.01 will not fix trim problems, so we await 9.02.