Ian Lane

Hi Dubman, Are you using macOS Ventura? We have been investigating an issue that some users are seeing in some files on Ventura where printing, page setup and setting the paper size can occasionally crash. We are also working with Apple where they identified another issue in the print dialog that they are preparing a fix for in an upcoming OS update. A workaround that we have found is that clearing the print settings before printing can stop the crash from occurring. Please see the attached script to try and let me know what OS you are using. Thanks! Clear Print Settings.txt

Hi Ian, Thanks for pointing this out. We will investigate and see what is going on. These kinds of small things may seem minor, but they can be big annoyances to users. Thanks again!

Hello Rishie, I can create a bug for you for this. Can you explain the steps that you are doing to reproduce this to make sure that I understand? It's possible that this is working better in a newer version of macOS or VW but we will need to test first. Thanks.

Yes there are many different languages and libraries that now provide this type of UI on Windows. Many of the MS apps (Word, Excel, Visual Studio, etc) are now built using a library that sits on top of MFC and provides adaptive colors and extended functionality (animation, etc). That is what we are using with Vectorworks as we update systems. Since MS owns and supports these libraries, they are continuously updated and should future proof our UI. Once the work is done to support theme switching it will allow us to support any theme that we want in the future (light/dark, green, blue, etc). Hopefully that answers your question.

Hi Sean, Sorry but I wish it was that simple. The main code for the Windows UI of Vectorworks is 20+ years old based on MFC, which does not directly support adaptive colors. Adaptive colors allow for a line to be dark in one theme and light in another. Because of the size of the application, we have hundreds of custom controls, palettes, dialogs, etc that were built with a certain theme and certain colors in mind. They may have hard coded colors, such as black that would disappear when the theme is changed, or other visual problems, and the icon system also needs to support the change. All of these places need to be modified to support the new theme. And in addition, a new theme doesn't just change the colors it can also change the sizing of things, which can lead to cropped controls etc. We have been steadily working for a number of years at updating these systems to support new themes and adaptive colors. It is important work to do but we also need to be careful because users will not directly gain any benefits from this work, they will just see the bugs, until the whole system is ready to be turned on. And as always we balance the priority of this versus other features since it is a large time investment. A number of years ago the entirety of the Mac UI was re-written with new Apple systems, which was a multi year project, but it allowed for us to use dark mode more or less out of the box when Apple added the feature. But this isn't how Microsoft does things, for good and bad. Hopefully this information helps explain the situation. Obviously we are aware of the request and we have been working on it for a while with plans to release when it is ready. Best Regards, Ian

Hi everyone, thanks for your input and your continued support of Vectorworks. I agree that dark mode would be a great enhancement to Vectorworks on Windows. And while this is not included in the latest 2023 release, the feature is in development. Please refer to the "In Development" tab on the Public Roadmap. If you haven't seen this already please check it out! https://www.vectorworks.net/en-US/public-roadmap Thanks again and take care, Ian

I would recommend that you turn off automatic graphic switching in the battery settings under preferences. This seems to resolve the problem. We have been working with Apple on this issue but we have not found a fix yet that we can do in Vectorworks. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Hi David, The workaround that we are recommending at this time is to disable automatic graphic switching on your laptop. The usage of the onboard graphics seems to be causing this issue somehow on some computers. Go to the Battery settings in the System Preferences and turn OFF the "automatic graphics switching" if available? Restart the computer and see if the issue goes away. Best Regards, Ian

Great news, thanks for confirming! It seems that somehow VW is getting confused about which monitor the main menu is being displayed on which is causing the menus not to work, even though all the menu shortcuts function, etc. We are continuing to investigate this to try and figure out why it is happening. Just be aware that it is entirely possible that the same problem will happen again until we figure out the problem. Thanks again!

Can you try going into System Preferences -> Displays. And then in the dialog set your display to use a scaled value and pick something like "Larger Text" and hit OK at the prompt. Then go back to VW and see if the menus are working again. If they are working, you should be able to switch your display setting back to the "Default for my display" setting.

Hi everyone, we have been having difficulty figuring out the cause of this issue that a few users have reported on Monterey but we are still working to figure it out. I would recommend updating your OS to the latest Monterey 12.1. There are some reasons to think that this may resolve your issue. If you decide to do this, please report back and let us know if this helps. Here is some additional info: Unfortunately, reinstalling VW will not help. You can try closing and reopening the lid on your laptop. Reports indicate this clears the issue in the meantime. Another thing you can try is go into your computer's battery settings and try turning OFF the "automatic graphics switching" option and see if it helps. Please see this thread for more info.

Yes this has been fixed for VW 2021 with SP5 and it will be fixed in 2022 in an upcoming service pack.

I would recommend updating to Monterey 12.1. If you do, please try to scale your display again and hopefully everything should work fine again in the new OS version. Please let us know if you decide to do this. Thanks for the info!

Hello, Thanks for the message. We are aware of this issue and I am happy to report that this will be fixed in Vectorworks 2022 service pack 2. This should be released in the next few weeks. Please update to the latest when you can and sorry for the problem that you have been seeing. Best Regards, Ian

Good morning, This problem has been fixed in the SP1.1 build that was released on 10/22/21, build 619242. Please make sure that you are using the latest SP1 release. This was a problem with the initial SP1 release that was released a few days prior. Please let me know if you are continuing to see any problems after updating. Best Regards, Ian

Hi Christiaan, Can you provide some more information on this? We are not seeing this crash anymore. What version of VW are you using and what build? Do you get a crash log? What is the behavior that you see on quit? Thanks!

Glad to hear it and hopefully it helps out!

Kaare, Sorry to hear that you've been having trouble with the feature. Early on we made some changes to make it harder to accidentally detach the tabs but some users reported that they were still having problems, while many other didn't have an issue at all. As Andy shared (thanks!), we added a new Lock tabs option in the utility menu of the palettes. When this is turned on you won't be able to detach or rearrange the tabs. Turning this on won't set things back to the way that they were, so you can move tabs around or detach them and then lock them how you want them to avoid accidental changes in the future. Hopefully this helps you out and thanks for your continuing feedback. -Ian

Hi Ryan, Our general policy is that we never recommend users to upgrade their machine to any beta operating system versions, especially not the first beta that is released. There are almost always bugs in the beta releases that need to be fixed, and keep in mind that things like printer drivers are normally not available immediately. We do not get early access to macOS betas, so our testing just started for Monterey when it became available to us yesterday. We will update our with our findings over the coming weeks as we do more testing with Vectorworks.

Hello, The M1 Macbook Air that we have is the 8GB version. I'm not sure if the 16GB was even available when we purchased this since we got it when they first came out, but I would say that this machine is pretty entry level. Thanks, Ian

Please follow the official thread for the latest updates to our testing efforts on M1. There was an update posted yesterday in fact. Enjoy!

Hi everyone, Thanks for all of your feedback so far. We have been listening and trying to reproduce some of the issues that you have described. The "Dock Tabs Here" option should be available all the time, if you aren't seeing this it could be a bug on our end, but we haven't been able to reproduce this issue yet. If you have any additional info please let me know. We have made a change that will go into VW 2021 SP2 that will make it a little harder to detach the tabs. You will need to click drag a little farther away, so hopefully this will help some of the people who have been accidentally detaching the tabs when they don't intend to. For your future info: Palette positioning is stored in both the workspace and the saved settings files in your user folder. When you open VW and move some palettes around, that info is stored in the saved settings, which takes priority. That way we don't need to create a custom workspace just to save the palette positions. But if you open the workspace editor or run the "Save Palette Positions" menu command, then the positions are written into the workspace also. If you want to reset your palette positions for some reason you can use the Reset Saved Settings button in the VW Preferences dialog box, but you will also have to go back to a stock workspace if the positions have been saved there also. Hopefully this provides some more insight into how these systems work together. Best Regards, Ian

Unfortunately I doubt that Apple Silicon will have any affect on Apple's tools regarding support for older versions of the OS, etc. Apple is very aggressive about pushing the latest updates, and their hardware, software and tools seem to follow this policy as well. As for the universal binary, I would expect that universal binary support will be baked into all releases for a while. It is hard for us to have an official policy on this because we don't know how long Apple will continue to release Intel based machines and how long they will continue to support those machines. A given version of Vectorworks tends to have official support for 5 or 6 versions of MacOS. So for VW 2021, it will run and be supported on 10.12, 10.13, 10.14, 10.15, 11.0 and eventually 11.1 when that is released next year. I do not expect that to change moving forward. Here is a list VW versions and official OS support that we have maintained through the years.

Hi Mau, You are correct that at this time we do not recommend upgrading to Big Sur if you are using Vectorworks 2019. We always like to be proactive and make users aware of the issues that they might face if they decide to upgrade their OS. We want to be transparent and make sure users can make the most informed decision. As Zoomer mentioned, VW 2019 does not run well on Big Sur. And thank you to Christiaan for his detailed post, he explained the situation almost perfectly. We have historically avoided supporting versions two years back and older because of the inordinate amount of effort that it can take and the risk of creating an unstable version of VW that might be worse on the OS versions that it was designed for. Here are some more technical details also if you are interested: The main difficulty with supporting older versions of VW in the newest MacOS versions is difficulties working with Apple’s tools. VW 2019 was built with an older version of Apple's development tools (Xcode) that does not run on Big Sur. It is not safe to try and create a new version of VW 2019 using a new version of these tools because this can introduce bugs and make 2019 unstable. This forces us to work with an older development environment running on an older OS, which makes any fixes difficult because you can’t test and work in the OS that you are trying to fix things for. We will continue to keep our users informed as we investigate these issues and Big Sur is officially released. Best Regards, Ian

Hi Larry, Jeremy may be correct above about your workspace files being corrupted somehow. I haven't seen this particular problem before but it definitely looks incorrect. I have sent you a private message requesting your workspace files so that we can investigate the problem. Palette data is stored in two different places in your user folder, the saved settings file and the workspace itself. If there is saved settings information for a workspace then that is used first, and then it falls back to the workspace if there is no palette info available in the saved settings. This allows for palette positions to be saved without having to modify the workspace file. You can reset the palette positions in your saved settings by using the Reset Saved Settings button on the Session tab of the Vectorworks Preferences dialog, but note that resetting that will also clear out other data. But this is a way to reset those palette positions if that is causing the problem. Another option is to just create a new workspace based on one of our shipping 2021 workspaces. That may be the best solution if you are still having issues. Best Regards, Ian