I would like to say, as an old school hand draftsman who was introduced to CAD via AutoCAD that I am very happy with VW and the general ease of Spotlight. It is the program of choice at Boston University and the Huntington Theatre (not the scene shop, though. Carpenters...) I think its time for some fine tuning. My intent is not to provide some hopefully helpful feedback based on my general frustrations when working with the program....
1)Text...specifically fonts..... a) why can't the program remember your default font, size, alignment, and style the way that it remembers absolutely everything else? The shift control T thing is okay but every time I open a drawing, particularly one that I am just editing rather than creating from scratch, is unfortunate. b) I am also generally frustrated by the randomness with which VW replaces a chosen font with Arial. I draft on my desktop in Stylus BT, move the drawing to my laptop and everything is in arial. all of my label legends, any symbols i've made that have text are all shot to hell. (Yes i've checked the font mapping and yes Stylus BT is loaded onto my laptop) I deleted 9.5.1 for this very problem. (I opened 3 drawings and all of them had the fonts in arial) c)PLEASE create a hot key (shift ENTER?) so that one can escape from typing text without having to drag the mouse across the drawing to get the selection tool and then all the way back to properly position the text within the drawing. d)I've also had a great deal of trouble editing bold face type. The cursor isn't placed where it appears to be. This lends itself to some very creative spellings. e) I am still having a problem (previously posted and file emailed to you) with bold and bold underline in my label legends where it will switch from what the legend says and what the drawing says. Edit symbold reveals that the channel is bold underline and the unit number is bold) but in the drawing the channel is only bold and the number is bold and underlined.
2)Label Legend Manager....if I had a nickel for everytime that thing put the red and blue boxes in my drawings while NOT letting me edit or create a new legend....much easier to edit them as a symbol.
3)Multi circuit units....again close but not quite. Its near impossible to draft strip lights the way that they should be drafted (the long rectangle with three channel circles at one end and only one strip light has text in it).
4)The object info and resources palette need to have a smaller text so that I don't loose a third of my monitor space to be able to read the buttons.
5)Speaking of the object info...have you noticed that if you use the double arrow to page down (looking at instrument data) that the both of the up arrows disappear? Also, frequently the layer drop down bar/menu thing isn't visible until you click on where it is supposed to be
6)Zoom... a) A double click (no matter how little you've moved the mouse) should dump you out of either zoom tool the way that it does with the line tool. So tired of using double V to zoom out, double clicking the mouse by mistake, and being zoomed to nine miles from the drawing... b) the "distance" to which double V or a click on the zoom button (bottom right) moves should be a preference.
7) Classes.....(again, the class layer structure of VW...so much better than AutoCAD) a)i like to draft with a class for each system (front, xL, leko bax, etc) especially on 300+ unit shows. Its just easier to organize. I keep all of my symbols drafted in the NONE class. When assigning a unit to a class, I can't allow VW to change all sub-objects because the base symbol will go to the wrong class and now i can't see any of the units. on the other hand, neither can i use the show snap others (which would make selecting entire systems easier) because with the front light class active, the none class isn't touchable and so neither is the unit. Its too hard to keep using find/modify to change the class of entire systems. b)why can't I ungroup a item and have it retain its class info? Can that become an option that appears with control U? c)why can't i select color and lineweight defaults when i create the class? why do i have to create the class and then edit it?
8)Edit sheet, delete sheet keeps me in edit sheets mode (in the event i want to edit or delete another sheet) and that's cool. Edit sheet, edit sheet puts me back in the drawing so that a new text class has to be edit sheet, edit sheet for every sheet that there is.
9)Pipe label preferences (position summary, auto number, etc) should be editable in a drop down menu not once with the first pipe and if you change your mind too bad.
10)Object Info, displaying unit information...
move device type up by class/layer then top to bottom:inst type-position-unit#-chan-color-temp-user1-user2. take all of the circuit/dimmer/system info and give it its own tab. same with all of that misc junk between the important info at top and the UID at the bottom. (very helpful to reference the UID when dealing with LW3's patent inability to merge).
11) Why does auto scroll (taking the cursor beyond the drawing's edge) react differently on the two ruler edges (the top and screen left which auto scroll) to the other edges (bottom and screen right) which requires you to go beyond the boundry of the drawing and then slide back into the drawing?
It would be nice to hear back on the font stuff because i loathe arial and hate seeing it on every one of my drawings but the rest of the stuff is intended to give you a little feedback from an 80% happy customer. Its always the little stuff, right?
Thank you for your time and consideration with all of this and good luck with future revisions.
TH
