jan15

You read someone's quote. The actual post where he said that was the opening of a thread called Stalinist NNA, and the full post is much funnier than the excerpt you read. But that was the old Petri. The new Petri shows a very pleasant and courteous side, as in this post, where he says "I sincerely apologize for the previous insulting post." The insults are milder, too. He says "muddled, totally stupid & useless," rather than "KGB-agents," "Tshekists," and "Gestapo." And it sounds like he's giving up the Mr. Spock fantasy: I think this new, kinder, gentler Petri should be encouraged. We shouldn't make fun of him.

I sometimes make a large or complex group red before editing it, and then change it back to black when I'm done.

Well, that's a relief. The thread is incredibly long-winded and inane, as you pointed out, and I was distressed at the thought that someone made it worse by manually counting the words. My browser doesn't have that feature. But what about that Venetian blind thing? You said you never heard of them in Venice. That makes sense. I noticed that the French called their French fries something else when I was there, and my German friends told me they don't know what we mean by German chocolate cake, and that they have something called American cookies. But do the Venetians have the thing that we in the U.S. call Venetian blinds? Maybe under a different name? Persian blinds? This photo shows something that looks a bit like Venetian blinds, only they're on the exterior. They'd be more effective there, but wouldn't withstand the climate in much of the U.S.

Who are you, and what have you done with Petri? Mike, Maybe it was called that simply because Autocad layers are displayed in alphabetical order? Calling it "0" keeps it at the top forever, since you can't rename it. I remember that some people used to number their AC layers, back when there weren't so many of them. Lots of people used 8-digit numbers as filenames, because they were limited to 8 characters under DOS. Orso, You counted the words???

Do the layers you can't snap have a different scale? 'Others' really only means others at the same scale.

Old versions worked differently. In v8, a hatch without background fill can be selected when the cursor is over one of the hatch lines. In v10, it can be selected anywhere, the same as a background-filled hatch.

If the file doesn't have a lot of layers, you could just Ctrl-C Copy everything from the erroneous file, and then Paste-in-Place into a new empty file that has all the right classes and class settings. You'd have to do each layer separately, since objects always paste onto the active layer and don't bring their layer with them. Paste-in-Place keeps them in proper alignment. But you could do all the classes at once. They'd all keep the class they were in originally, but use the class settings of the new file.

Islandmon, did you just make that up while you were lying on the beach sipping a rum punch? Fenestration means windows even in English, but the New Jersey part - turning finestra into Venetian - that sounds far-fetched. A quick check of web sources (example) suggests they're called Venetian blinds because Venetian traders first brought them from Persia in the 18th century. This site says they were called Venetian blinds in an 1841 U.S. patent. I don't think there were many Italians in New Jersey then.

If you do that, I don't think I could ever use VectorWorks again, and I'm sure a lot of new users would be discouraged from buying it. It would be impossible to decide whether something should be in the General class or not, whether it really 'involves or is applicable to the whole'. It would be too confusing. :grin:

Ouch! Lighten up, Christiaan. Mike's the one who tried to defend your idea of what 'None' means. I kidded him in my rebuttal to that, but I think Mike is probably the most perceptive and considerate contributor to these forums. 'Always excel at missing my point' seems very unfair.

Mike, that's great that you have a dictionary that can tell you what 'none' means. But what about grammar and syntax? 'None' is a pronoun. 'Any' can be a pronoun, as in the definition 'none = not any'. But in the phrase 'not any class' it's an adjective. You can't just plug the one in for the other. You could say that 'no class' means 'not any class'. But 'none class' doesn't have any inherent meaning in English. Putting two substantives together can only suggest a meaning based on what we know about the two words, as with 'fire truck' or 'fire brick'. In this case it suggests a class that doesn't have any of some unspecified thing, perhaps a thing that other classes do have. Besides, 'not any class' means boorish or unrefined. It doesn't mean 'not a class'. Does your dictionary say that 'none' = 'not a'? Of course, you could always rename the 'None' class, and call it 'Not a'. And there's nothing to prevent Christiaan from renaming it 'General' in his prototype file, if he wants to promote Colonel Class to that rank.

Are you accusing me of lying about it? In the post you quoted, I said that I perceived it that way from the beginning, i.e. from the first time I saw that the default class is called None. The tip-off may have been in the fact that it's the name of a class, which to me would force it to mean something other than 'no class'. Perhaps it's not that I don't have "a reasonable grip on the English language", but rather that I don't have a predisposition to find anomalies in minutiae. My perception may also have been affected by my prior experience with AutoCad, whose default class is called '0' (which never suggested to me that there are no objects in the default class). The transition from '0' to 'None' would have fit in nicely with the tendancy I was discovering for VW to use short meaningful names where AC used cryptic acronyms or numbers.

"None", to me, doesn't suggest the meaning "no class". It suggests "no distinguishing features". I find it consistent and intuitive, since the other classes are named for the features that distinguish them. There would be other ways to convey that meaning, but "None" is good because it's short. That's how I perceived it from the start. I didn't really go through an ontological nightmare. When I suggested that we all did so, I was being facetious. The nomenclature changes that I suggested were also tongue-in-cheek. I apologize.

That's a good point. The "None" class should always be displayed at the bottom of the list of classes, and it should be renamed "NoneOfTheAbove". That'll save new users from the ontological nightmare that we all went through. :grin:

I think "None" is okay, but I'd like to see the term "Class" changed to "Category". That would get rid of the socialist overtones. And I'd like "VectorWorks" changed to "VectorCad", which is more consistent with industry practice. I'm preparing a long list of other terms I'd like changed. Also a complete guide to the syntax I'd like to see used for all annotations in VW's source code. I'll post them here when I'm finished. :grin:

Kellhammer, is that "SP hand" still available? I can't find it. Not even a sample of what it looks like.

You can select the text object (or use the Custom Selection command to select all text objects) and then pull down Text > Size and pick a point size or pick Set Size to type one in. Alternatively, you can select the text object(s) and use the Scale Objects command (with Scale Text selected) to increase the size by a specified factor.

"Custom Selection" with "More Choices", including "Type is Text", and "Class (or Layer) is _____".

Right under the "Open Files" section, in the same pull-down list, don't you have a "Favorites" section, listing all the files in the "Object Libraries" folder?

Have you tried turning off everything in the Constraints palette except "Snap to Grid"? I think that gets the result you want, provided that the whole file is drawn that way. This may not apply to you, but one way that those small errors can occur is if you accept values that you see in the Data Display Bar, without "Snap to Grid" only. The numbers that appear there are rounded to whatever you specified in the "Units" dialog box. The precise values at the cursor may be different. If you mouse to a point and then Tab or Keypad Enter through the data bar to lock in a value, I think you're actually locking in the current cursor position, not the rounded-off number shown in the bar. To get a precise value in the data bar, I think you have to type it in.

You can use the VW Select tool to move by remote vector. You just have to draw a temporary line, and drag that line together with the object you want to move. Maybe they thought that's good enough. For me it is good enough, since I don't need it very often. I downloaded one of the tools that Mike mentioned, but I don't use it. I find it easier to do the workaround than to keep another tool on hand just for that purpose. But I know many people disagree.

We do have something like Autocad's multiple copy by base point -- the Symbol Insertion tool. After all, if you're going to have a bunch of copies of something, shouldn't it be a symbol?

It's remote vector or remote displacement that everybody's talking about. The idea is that the points that define the move vector don't have to be on the object being moved. So if you have something on an elevation that's x,y above the left corner of a door, and you want to put it in the same position relative to another door, you can click on the corners of the two doors. The object gets displaced by the angle and distance between the two doors. Other CAD programs' move commands can do that, because they can only move with a separate Move command. VW's system of moving with the Select tool is better, but, as always, we want the VW stuff plus the other stuff.

On my Windows machine the Escape key does that. Select an object, click on the Object Info palette, type a value there, hit Esc, then press the shortcut key for another tool. Or I can just change to the other tool before going into the OIP. I can draw a rectangle, change to the circle tool, type a value in the OIP for the rectangle's length, and when I click on the drawing window again the point I click is the center of a new circle. It's hard to get in the habit of thinking ahead like that, but handy once you do. And I can use the Escape key to exit from a text, as well as the keypad Enter key that you mentioned.

Danny, why not just use the Dimension class to distinguish dimensions from other objects? VW can do it automatically. You won't have to change the Active Class before you dimension. All those things you mentioned as layers could just as well be classes.