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Ok, so if someone imported one of your symbols, they'd import the class the symbol is in, but not a hundred extra classes for its various components. Presumably they could go into the symbol after import and apply their own classes if that's how they dealt with materials and textures and so on. But actually, why do they need to be in special classes anyway? Why not just have them all set to "none" - then people could import and assign classes as they wished. I too find myself fighting most parametric symbols, and have never been that keen on them. However with windows and doors I can maybe see the point, largely because of the issue of cutting a hole for them... I could make my own door symbol in the way you describe but then I'd have to manually cut a hole for each wall I wanted to put it into - and move that hole each time I moved the door. For things like, say, sanitaryware fittings, making home-made symbols works fine.

So...I have now updated from VW2011 to VW2016 (the trial version, anyway). I am pleased to see that it now appears to be possible to generate a horizontal section that shows doors correctly (ie with swing line etc). Well, almost. I've attached an image from a very simple test file. Top LH corner is the conventional top/plan view. Bottom LH corner is what I get generating a horizontal section from the clip cube. It kind of shows the door correctly. But with a thick line drawn across the threshold. Why? Is there some way I can get rid of this line?

Having moved from VW2011 to 2016 I've been trying to get my head around levels and stories. I'm finding them as confusing as most contributions to this thread suggest they are for most people. I see this thread is from a year ago. Is there any plan to try and implement any of the changes proposed above?

I get the idea in principle. Questions that come to mind for me - - would everyone using these symbols have to have, to some extent, the same drawing setup? For example if I import one of these symbols, will it contain a load of extra classes that aren't already in my drawing? So, say I organise my classes by material, and I've already got a "steel" class, then when I import a symbol with steel components am I then going to have two "steel" classes with slightly different attributes? This is already a problem I have with importing 2d symbols provided by manufacturers, etc. I often end up importing the symbol into a separate file, tidy it up, maybe change everything to class "0" then take it into my drawing before re-assigning my own classes as necessary. And by the time I've done that, I almost might as well have drawn it from scratch myself. And don't get me started on imported symbols that contain way, way too much detail (say, a standard section for a roof light in which every single screw and its thread is drawn, bogging down the drawing with millions of unnecessary lines). - would this have to be an all-or-nothing approach? I can see the attraction of being able to attach information to components of a drawing, in the way you describe. But if I start adding, say, paint colour details in this way, then do I have to record *all* paint colour detail in notes attached to drawing elements? For example, (currently) I might have a finishes schedule which would record the colour of a window frame but also of a wall or ceiling. That info would be fairly easy to attach to to a discrete element like a window but then do I have to work out a way of doing this for a wall too? Because, if I don't, and keep the wall colour recorded in a manually created schedule, then the benefit of having my automatically generated spreadsheet is lost, and potentially the situation is actually worse because I'm then trying to maintain two parallel systems of recording information. These are quite dull and prosaic points. But it's this kind of stuff that always seems to defeat attempts to record information in a more efficient way. A lot of stuff would be possible if we had one, agreed, standard way of setting up a drawing, which worked for everyone regardless of project type, and which everyone - including anyone making component symbols - complied with completely. But that's something we don't seem to have managed yet. I know that's partly what BIM is supposed to be about, but I think we're yet to see if it *really* works in real life and can work at all scales of projects and levels of detail.

This is very welcome. In the last few months, I've been considering very seriously whether or not it makes sense to continue investing my time and money in Vectorworks. This is in part prompted by an attempt to change the way I draw, moving more in to 3D-based information. Something I think a lot of people are trying to figure out at present. Whilst VW is excellent in 2D there are now many other packages which are in some regards superior for 3D work, and fast catching up in other areas. Some of these are less expensive than VW. Sketchup for example. There are lots of things that make me want to persevere with VW but at the same time a worry that it's an evolutionary dead end, and is going to get left behind by the competition. Letting us see that there's a path set for VW to follow, that will keep it relevant and address current shortcomings, will go quite a long way in moderating those worries, which I'm sure others share.

I might be interested in this... I sent you a PM, IanH.

The files I work with at the moment aren't huge (I'm making do with VW2011 on a modestly specced 2011 mac mini!) but I think that's going to start changing. I'd rather have a bit of spare headroom, so I don't have to worry about hardware too much for the next few years. Thanks for the pointer to Create Pro, has been very helpful having a look at their setup, as has been the guy from the company who's been answering my various questions.

(I should say a further option on the rebuilt pro is to go for a £1340 option that gives me a Radeon HD 5770 GPU, which I could start off with and se how it goes, and replace myself with an R9 at a later date for about £250. Then the savings, initially, are approaching £1000.)

Well, here's how I see my options having looked at this fairly intensively. Firstly, VW knowledgebase articles seem to suggest that a good GPU is fairly critical. And the recommendations for VRAM seem to hover around 2GB as a minimum, with 4GB+ being suggested as preferable. So, the way it looks to me, if I want to future-proof myself a bit I ought to be looking for something that gives me more than 2GB VRAM. And because iMacs aren't upgrade-able after purchase, satisfying that pushes to me the top-end iMac which can give me a Radeon R9 M395X with 4GB VRAM (all other options in the iMac line are 2GB). And the price for that is £2049. That's with an i5 processor, and I've seen quite a few comments around the messageboard threads here saying that it's worth going up to an i7 - which would make the price £2,249. On the other hand I can get a rebuilt mac pro for £1610 which as far as I can make out will give me a CPU with similar performance to i7, and an R9 280X with 3GB VRAM, which as far as I can make out ought to perform better than the "M" version cards in the iMac. And it gives me the option of upgrading the GPU in a couple of years without having to buy a new computer. Of course, the iMac comes with the very nice 5k screen, and the Mac Pro option comes with the risk that it might become unsupported in a few years. But I've already got a monitor that's good enough for now, and the price difference seems potentially to be around £600. Am I mad still to be contemplating that Mac Pro option (which actually comes with a 3 year RTB warranty that isn't voided by me adding memory etc)?

Is that including models which have a 64bit CPU and can actually boot in 64 bit though?

I asked the people at Create Pro about this. Their response: "The only time they have withdrawn OS X support is for 32 bit systems, our Mac Pros are fully 64 bit, just like the rest of the current Apple product line up. So we can’t see this happening anytime soon."

Well, that'll get me 3.46GHz 6 Core Xeon W3690 Mac Pro 5,1 24GB RAM AMD R9 280X 3GB 256GB flash drive 2TB HDD for £1685. So the question is whether that gains me any advantage over the new iMac above for similar price.

Ok. I think my question is answered! Thank you. One other question, looking at iMacs including refurbed ones in the apple store - it seems that you can knock a few hundred pounds off with a lower spec graphics card - say, NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M graphics processor with 1GB of GDDR5 memory or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 775M graphics processor with 2GB of GDDR5 memory in place of AMD Radeon R9 M290 graphics processor with 2GB of GDDR5 memory I see in the VW knowledgebase articles that it's mentioned the GeForce ones with "M" suffix are laptop type ones and less powerful, so it's probably worth paying the extra for the GeForce option?

Sure, a legitimate concern. Although, El Capitan is still apparently supported on mac pros back to the 2008 one, so it would seem hopeful that you'd be good for another couple of releases. But it's an unknown of course, yes.

Here's my attempt at a comparison between buying a new iMac and used Mac Pro at similar price point. current iMac 27" CPU i5 3.2Ghz 8GB RAM GPU: R9 M390 2GB 1TB fusion drive ---£1599 used mac pro 5,1 (mid 2010) on ebay CPU 6-core 3.46Ghz 48GB RAM GPU: Geforce GTX 680 4GB 128GB SSD plus 4TB HDD ---£1750 (I suspect negotiable) Ignoring warranties and just looking at specs - does the new iMac potentially win out on account of having a newer graphics card? Or in some other way?

Thanks. Do you have any particular thoughts on the last-but-one mac pros (ie the 2010-2012 ones that came out before the new design)? Would you expect them to continue to work well for VW for a while yet?

Yes - I realise I was wrong about the iMac updates - I edited my post as you made yours I think. And yes I've checked out the refurb options from Apple - one of the main options I'm considering.

(And no I can't stomach the switch out of the cult at the moment!)

Yes, I'm aware of the warranty issue. Up to a point it's a risk I'm happy to take knowingly. I've done so on all the mac minis I've owned over the years, all of which bought secondhand when 2-3 years old and I've not had any problems. That said, the investment in a mac pro would be more substantial - but there are secondhand outlets which offer a 1 year warranty. I could argue that even if I buy "new" mac pro it would be a model released at the end of '13. So buying a model from 2012 doesn't seem hugely different.

Looking to get a new computer. For some time I've been a big fan of the mac mini - affordable, and seems to work fine for mainly 2D stuff. Plus, relatively easy to upgrade because I can keep my screens, keyboard etc and sell the old mini on ebay - or indeed do semi-unofficial component upgrades. Now I need something a bit more serious as I move into doing more 3d stuff. My options, if buying new, seem to be an Imac (upper end of the range to get the recommended video cards) or a Mac Pro (it looks like the lowest-end one would do me fine). But I'm not entirely keen on the iMac because it can't be upgraded and I've already got screens. And the Mac Pro would be very nice but of course expensive and probably overkill. So I'm starting to think about getting a second hand Mac Pro. Maybe the mid 2010 or mid 2012. My question is essentially... how future-proof will that be - especially with regards to VW? Will I get left behind in a couple of years when my computer is essentially 5 years old? Or is it reasonable to expect that they could hang on a bit perhaps with some component upgrades?

I think I might have worked out how to fix this, at least in some situations. It seems that if you have several viewports on a sheet, even if some of them don't have a drawing number label, VW has assigned them a number anyway. So, say you have 6 viewports, and you have one labelled "1" but no labels attached to the others. You are then trying to label one of the others "2" but VW is telling you that number's already in use. I think this is because it thinks one of the un-labelled viewports is no. 2. It may also think that all the other viewports have a number as well. So I think you can sort it out like this - apply high-number labels to all those viewports...say, number them 10,11,12,13 and 14. Now they have a label sequence that doesn't cause VW conflicts, and the number 2,3,4,5 and 6 slots are free. I *think* it generally then works to go back and re-number those viewports with the sequence you want.

This is how I've been dealing with this situation. I thought, this is messy - must learn how to do this properly...there must be a way of doing this - at least, maybe in the latest release even if not in VW2011 (which I'm using at present). So a bit of searching brought up this thread - and the answer seems to be, no, there is no tidy way of doing this, even in the latest, supposedly BIM-tastic version of VW. Is it unreasonable to feel this is a pretty basic capability to be missing? If I'm trying to move towards a way of working where as much info as possible is contained within the drawing and associated databases, this kind of thing really saps any faith that sticking with Vectorworks is going to make this easy. I can create databases and spreadsheets...but only up to a size that will fit on whatever printed page area I happen to be using? Unless I want to mess around with cropped views which as tsw points out above, are liable to go awry whenever extra rows are added. Really?

When I start a new project I tend to re-use a file from a previous one, deleting the project-specific info but retaining the basic layer/class set-up etc. It's a lazy alternative to setting up a fresh template file. So this issue could be related to a problem in the drawing file that gets copied over each time. Thinking about it, the drawing file I'm currently using would have originated when I was using VW2008. It's not really an option to rebuild the current file. But I suppose I should think about making a template from scratch for future projects. Any suggestions about how to fix it in my current file would be welcome though.

Thanks JimW and no, you're not looking at the wrong thing. I did the same as you describe in a new file and everything worked fine. I use a custom sheet border and titleblock so tried again, using these, but again there were no problems. So I don't know why it seems to be a problem in the file I'm currently working on. But I've had the same issue in other drawing files too.

..anyone?