RLKHydro
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Posts posted by RLKHydro
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just wanted to second this one. We're hoping the new Landmark software will offer significant improvements in this area.
RLK Hydro, Inc.
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I agree that it takes awhile to learn all the ins and outs of using the 2D reshape tool, but it is one of the most powerful tools available. I use it all the time. I've started preferentially drawing polygons even when a rectangle would do, just so I'll have the option of using this tool when making revisions. So I'd be OK with reorganizing the way it's displayed on the palette as long as none of the current functionality is lost.
Barb N
RLK Hydro, Inc.
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Just wanted to add my vote to this one. The text editor is (to me) one of (if not THE) major drawbacks of using Vector Works.
Barb Nelson
RLK Hydro, Inc.
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Thank you, Peter. That does solve the problem for figuring the total perimeter. While playing with it, we discovered that if you even just "shift-click" on each one, the perimeter will increment correctly. Don't know how we missed that! But still it would be nice in some cases to be able to join them into one polygon--when there are many to be joined, for example. Also, the grouped polygons don't always fill as you'd expect, although that's not a problem in this particular drawing.
Sorry for the delay in replying, I ended up being out of the office for a few days.
Barb Nelson
RLK Hydro
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Two or three times now I've run into the problem you're having and it turned out that an entire layer of the DXF drawing had been made into a symbol. Using "Convert to Group" and then "Ungroup" solved the problem. I don't know enough about AutoCAD to know how this happens, though, so don't know if it will help in your situation or not.
Barb Nelson
RLK HYdro
[This message has been edited by RLKHydro (edited 11-14-2000).]
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quote:Originally posted by Thomas Ames:Is there a way, using attributes, to put an arrow on the end of a graceful, curved line.
I don't like the way arcs look as well as polylines, so I usually just draw arrowheads on the ends of polylines using the polygon tool. also have tried drawing a very short line at the end of the polyline and then using the arrowhead tool on the attribute palette. Has anybody posted this to the wish list?? This seems like something VW should be able to handle.
Barb Nelson
RLK Hydro
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We are trying to find a way to join two open polygons. We frequently need to trace lines on bitmap images (for example, a particular elevation line from a topo map). Sometimes these lines are quite long (100+ vertices), and are difficult to draw in a single pass. But if you stop one polygon and start another one at its endpoint, is there a way to join them together? The "join" command does nothing in this instance (unless we are using it incorrectly). "Add surface" works, but turns the resulting shape into a closed polyline, so the "perimeter" value in the object info pane is no longer accurate. Any suggestions?
TIA--
Barb Nelson
RLK Hydro, Inc.
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quote:Originally posted by Janis Kent:Colman- I know of a lot of people who work on large files - it doesn't necessarily mean that that is the best way to work. File sizes are certainly larger than they use to be, but it would help to streamline the file down by both, using memory efficient objects and WorkGroup Referencing. ...Glad you find the books helpful!
Hi, Janis--I know exactly why our files are so large, it is because of imported bitmaps and .dwg files. We do a lot of site work, so sometimes need to plot a survey on top of a quad map (USGS topo) or a scanned aerial photo. We also import .dwg files from the county courthouse which have property boundaries, road easements, etc. on them. There really isn't a lot we can do to get the size of these files down--sometimes the elements that were actually created in VectorWorks will add up to less than 50K in size. We don't do any rendering at all.
I find your books useful, too!
Barb Nelson
RLK Hydro, Inc.
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quote:Originally posted by Dean Isham:HP 870 cxi and an HP 455 plotter. If the value of the color is even the least bit dark they print a very very dark color.
We had this problem with an HP 970cxi but it went away when we downloaded the most recent version of the printer driver from the HP customer support page. On the other hand, our HP Plotter, which is an older 350C, has a color table all its own. We're running it through MacPlot on a G3, so I'm not sure exactly where the problem comes in, but over time I've learned to not fight it. I plotted a color table and I use it to choose the colors the plotter does well, rather than trying to get it to plot the colors it "should." Example: the color which should print as pure magenta prints as pale pink on our plotter. But there's another color on the third row of the color table that plots as a pefect magenta, so I use that one. It's annoying--especially when exchanging files with clients--but I've never found a way to fix it.
Don't know if any of this applies to you, good luck solving your problems--
Barb Nelson
RLK Hydro
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I've imported lots of large tiff files, but never one quite that big. it may be simply a matter of size. Here are some ideas for reducing the file size.... Try PICT format and use the "Import PICT" command. If that doesn't work, try opening the file in a graphics program such as Graphic Converter or Photoshop. If you can do that, try reducing the number of colors, which can have a big impact on file size. Sometimes an image will be saved in 32bit color, but only use a few colors, so you can reduce the number of colors without affecting the image. Also you can lower the resolution (even small changes in resolution have a big affect (effect??) on file size). We import topographical maps that are 72 & 250 dpi and they still look OK. If that doesn't work or if you must have the higher resolution, you could try cutting the image into pieces, importing the pieces individually, and putting them back together in VectorWorks. Good luck!
Barb Nelson
RLK Hydro, Inc.
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quote:Originally posted by Craig Hollinshead:We are currently planning to offer an land development add-on package similar to the VectorWorks ARCHITECT product. We anticipate it will be out sometime early in 2001.
We've been keeping an eye on this--is there any more news about the land development add-on package? specifically--is there a release date? :-) We are very interested in this product.
thanks in advance--
RLK Hydro, Inc.
Kalispell, MT
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quote:Originally posted by Janis Kent:But, I think the main reason is the size of your file - 6 MG is BIG particularly if you[/b]
Hi-- excuse me for chiming in here, but I'm curious about this statement. We frequently (as in daily) create and edit files that are 5M - 35M in size, with occasional files that reach 50M. Is there a limit on the size or number of objects that VW can efficiently handle? We have about 290M or so of RAM installed on a G3. I don't get the out of memory messages very often, but I do get "VectorWorks has quit unexpectedly" crashes 2-3 times a week.
Also have had the zooming problem the original poster referred to, but that seems to happen mainly when there are large differences between scales of different layers in the drawing (i.e., a PICT image on a layer with a scale of 1=1 and an imported .dwg file on a layer with scale 1=2400). We've solved that problem by putting the pict images on layers with similar scale as the drawing, which works fine as long as the layer scale is set before the image is imported.
Interesting comment about MS Internet Explorer--have run into that one at home and switched to Netscape because of it, but that's on a PC, not a Mac.
Barb Nelson
RLK Hydro
Kalispell, MT, USA
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Thanks, AC--sounds like the bottom line is there is no easy way to do curved leader lines. But doing it with an arc may turn out better than the polylines--I'll try it.
Barb
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Hi, Fred-- thanks for your response. Could you explain what you mean by "curve line by 3 points"? I'm still pretty new at this. I've tried all varieties of polyline (bezier, cubic spline, arc) and when they are selected, the arrow ends in the attributes pallet are grayed out. I'm unaware of any other way to create a curved line. I'm using v8.5.2.
Barb Nelson
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Is there a way to do curved leader lines? I have been using polylines, but this is a pain since polylines don't allow arrow heads, so I have to manually add the arrow head.
Thanks in advance--
Barb Nelson
RLK Hydro, Inc.
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I've run into this problem when working with imported dxf files, but haven't noticed it when creating drawings from scratch, so I thought it was just a problem with the imported files. anybody else?
Barb Nelson
RLK Hydro
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Bob-- I've run into the same problem, and I'll tell you how I get around it but it's only a workaround, doesn't entirely solve the problem. choose "Gray Others" in the Layer Options menu (under "Organize"), then switch to a different layer (you may have to create another [empty] layer if you only have one), the image will appear only as a bounding box and you will be able to see the page rectangle. Of course, you won't be able to see the image details, but by switching back and forth between layers I can usually get what I want. I'd love to know if anybody else out there has a better solution....
hth--
Barb Nelson
RLK Hydro
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oops--forgot one other thing--
have the default font, style and size saved with the drawing, so that when you switch back and forth between drawings, you don't have to continually reset the default font.
thanks--
B. Nelson
RLK Hydro
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VW 8.5 is a great program which I enjoy using, but I have to say that the text editing capabilities are abysmal. We frequently need to include large sections of text (specifications, tables of data, etc) in our drawings, and VW makes this work tedious and frustrating. Here are just a few suggestions, in addition to the ones posted by other people.
- enable the cursor position keys (above the arrow keys on a PC keyboard) so that "home" moves to the beginning of the line, "end" moves to the end of a line, etc. Also enable ctrl+arrow key to move word by word in either direction. Shift+arrow key to select text would be a nice addition, too, although less crucial than the others. These are all fairly common key assignments in word processing software.
- Either implement tabs OR improve the import/cut and paste capabilities so that you don't lose tab formatting when pasting text from a word processor
- and a very small item, but one that would make me happy: if you double click on text, automatically enter text editing mode. Or if you have text selected and click on the text tool, automatically enter text editing mode without having to click again on the text.
Barbara Nelson
RLK Hydro
Kalispell, MT
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thank you, Juan! This file came to us originally as a v14 AutoCAD .dwg file, so there is no "z" field value (or at least, not that I can find). But your method makes me wonder if we could export the points as a text file, then re-import them. hmmm, will have to play with this. thanks for your response--
Barb Nelson
RLK Hydro
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we had similar problems with a G3 and were able to solve them by reducing the number of colors displayed. I'd like to know a better solution, though. anyone else?
Barb Nelson
RLK Hydro, Inc.
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Well, darn. I was hoping you would have a simple solution. Would it be possible to write a VectorScript to do this? I've never written one, but it might be worth learning how to do it just to get this feature, it is something we would use all the time.
Thanks for your help--
Barb Nelson
RLK Hydro, Inc.
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Is there a way to select objects based on their z value (elevation)? As an example--we frequently do extensive editing of topographic site surveys and it would be nice to be able to select, say, all the contour lines with elevations between 3100' and 3200', or whatever.
Thanks in advance,
Barbara Nelson
RLK Hydro, Inc.
Kalispell, MT, USA
Crashes
in General Discussion
Posted
Just to throw in another .02, we are running VW 8.5.2 on a G3 266, OS 8.5.2, and we do not have these crashes. We use VW day in and day out and pan and zoom constantly. We did have some problems with this after upgrading to VW 8.5, but either the 8.5.2 upgrade or a video driver upgrade fixed the problem (we did them both at about the same time--several months ago--so I don't remember exactly which it was).
There are lots of us out here who are not experiencing these problems, which may explain the lack of response you are getting. Sorry I can't be more helpful, and I can understand why you are frustrated, but just wanted to put in a plug for the tech support people, who have always been most helpful and responsive to us.
Barb Nelson
RLK Hydro, Inc.
Kalispell, MT