jan15

That is interesting. I would have thought more than 25 percent of the VW user base is in North America. In fact, I would have done the same as the upFront writer and guessed that nearly all of the user base is in North America. Do you have a link to that newsletter? The last one I can find is #501, dated January 16, 2006 (but obviously meaning 2007). When I click on "Next Issue" I get a "Not Found" message.

Well, shucks and gosh. Sorry that yuh didn't like it. Yup, that's a good plan. You've "been using it for a few months now", so you've probably exceeded the ninety day trial period, but maybe you can get NNA to refund your money anyway by threatening to cripple their sales with a smear campaign.

25% of the North American market???

That changes automatically after you rack up a certain number of posts.

Windows: ? Look up the character code in "Character Map" (Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools) For most fonts the code for the degree symbol is 0176 or 0186. ? Type it on the numeric keypad (with NumLock on) while holding down the alt key.

I've had great luck with 995. The adware is harmless, only a nuisance, and after you test it just give them ten dollars and the ads go away. Check the "Advanced" section of the Printing Preferences control panel and make sure it's set for a high enough resolution. I use 600 dpi and get very small pdf files. One reviewer said he had problems with the "Substitute with Device Font" setting and recommended using "Download as Softfont" instead. Either setting seems to embed the fonts so that anyone you send a file to doesn't have to have your fonts installed in order to read the file properly. Another nice pdf program, totally free, is Foxit Reader. It's a small program and it opens pdf files instantly.

My ears started burning when I read that. Guilty as charged. As far as beneficial results of the mergers, what about a common native file format for VectorWorks, ArchiCad, and AllPlan? Is that a possibility at some future point? It would be something the rest of industry would have to pay attention to.

I don't know anything about AllPlan, but did you see the offer to try it out for a month for $99? http://cadconsulting-usa.com/allplan/leasing.htm There's some information there about how it works, and they offer a free manual and tutorial at http://cadconsulting-usa.com/support/nnfreeware.asp That site makes it sound like they're trying hard to sell AllPlan in the US, but I had a heck of a time finding it. There's no link to it at Nemetschek's AllPlan site. They link US customers instead to the NNA VectorWorks site (I can't find any mention of AllPlan there) and to a non-existent site.

That can't be right. I did it just like you said, and it came out to $10,000 per hour.

Now that's pretty exciting, if the things you have to do to set up the automatic updating aren't as baneful as manually updating is. Checking a set of drawings for reference coordination is as much fun as checking a manuscript for spelling. And that kind of organizing is exactly what a computer is good at. They love that kind of work, bless their little microscopic hearts.

No, but you can have multiple Classes inside a symbol. Just assign anything that you might want to hide to a class for that purpose.

It's often convenient that things are pasted onto the current layer ? as when moving or copying them within the same file, to a different floor level, or for 2D visibility, and when moving them to a layer with a different scale. So some good things would be lost if the paste command were changed as you suggest. It might be better to think in terms of a new command for copying entire multi-layer detail drawings to a different file. Maybe someone could write a script to do that.

Another possible workaround, using groups instead of workgroup referencing or back-and-forth paste-in-place: Set "active layer only", cycle down to the bottom layer (using Ctrl-up/down), select all of the detail, Group it, cycle up to the top layer, and repeat. Then set "show/edit others" and repeat again. So now the detail is a group, with a nested group for each layer's content. Copy the group, close the source file without saving, Paste into the target file, Ungroup, yielding the two sub-groups on the same layer, then change the layer of one sub-group, then select the whole detail and Ungroup, and it's done. I don't know if that would be as good a solution on most systems as it is on mine. I have the Copy, Paste, Group, and Ungroup commands macro'd to unshifted function keys, and three of the layer states macro'd to alt-letter-key combinations, because I use all those constantly. This workaround might not be practical without that, especially if you issue commands via pull-down menus.

Are they nested Symbols, or nested Groups? Since AC doesn't have real groups, both are converted to AC Blocks. In either case, they can be easily eliminated in VW by selecting all, or using Custom Select of all Groups and/or Symbols, and then using commands Convert-Symbol-to-Group and Ungroup, as many times as necessary for the nesting, till no Groups or Symbols are left. If the problem is with line widths, perhaps because many VW users print line widths as line widths, and colors either as colors or as all black or as monochrome black and gray, why not do the same in AC with these files? AC now can assign lineweights to objects or layers, and then "Plot Object Lineweights" with no plot style table. You can still use color for other distinctions, but just print it all in black. If you want to see the lineweights while drawing, AC can even do that now, though it can only do it well in paperspace.

Did you read the recent discussion on this? Maybe something in that will help you: http://techboard.nemetschek.net/ubbthrea...=true#Post60010

There are some font files that only Autocad can use. In Windows, their filenames end in .SHX They can't be used by operating systems or by other CAD programs. But there are TrueType versions of most of those Autocad fonts. Their filenames are the same, except that they end in .TTF They can be installed in the system fonts folder and used by all programs, including the last several versions of Autocad. If you can't find a TrueType font with the same name as the SHX font, you have to get a print-out or PDF file to see what the font looks like, and then substitute the closest thing to it that you can find. Remember that after you install any new system font you have to re-start VectorWorks before it can use the new font.

The other-layer idea that Ray suggested is the easiest. But if for some reason you can't do that, you could use a combination of Send-to-Back and then Send-Forward for all subsequent objects that you send to the back. That combination will leave each new object one position in front of the very back, reserving the very back position for the one you want there.

It means "Do you want this copy of VW to be the one that is used to interpret all VW data files?" "For example, when you double-click on an .MCD file in My Computer or in Windows Explorer, do you want this copy of VW to be the one that Windows automatically chooses as the application that will open the .MCD file?" Files created by older versions are converted to v12 only when you open them, and they'll be saved as v12. But you're prompted for a filename when saving, so you can keep the old version also if you want. Each .MCD file has its own set of "Document Preferences", saved with the file, and each version of VW has its own "VectorWorks Preferences", unaffected by which file is currently open.

In Windows, you get special characters by typing a 4-digit code on the numeric keypad while holding down the Alt key. The codes can be different for different fonts. You can find any code for any installed font by using the program "Character Map" which comes with Windows (Programs > Accessories > System Tools). In the font that I use for drafting, the degree symbol is alt-0176 and the circumference symbol is alt-0216.

The Combine Into Surface tool does exactly what you say you want, as Exocubic pointed out in the first reply. It's been around since at least version 8. It doesn't convert the selected objects into a surface. It creates a new surface object by filling the space you click inside. Any object not selected at the time you issue the command is ignored.

With only that line selected, pull down Page > Set Attribute Defaults > Dash Styles. The Edit Dash window will open, with your dash style selected as the one to edit. You can edit that dash style, or you can create a new one just like it by clicking "Add" and then you can edit that new one. Edit by grabbing the vertical lines that extend from the stop and start point of each part of the pattern and dragging them to where you want them.

Yes, Arch16, it sounds like your problem is not lack of unicode support. But I've never heard of "levels" in fonts before. I don't know what that is. The only thing I can think of is that it might be a problem with the identification fields in the font file, since you said you have different problems with different operating systems and different versions of VectorWorks. I once had to make several different versions of a font file, because the original file wouldn't work with Autocad, and when I changed the file it wouldn't work with other programs, and then I found that neither of those two files would work with Windows XP. I couldn't find a way to make a version that would work correctly with both Win98 and WinXP, and with Autocad on the one hand and all other programs on the other. In some cases, a file wouldn't work at all with one combination, and in some cases it would work but not correctly. I never understood what caused the problem. I didn't make the font. It came on a CD full of Truetype fonts. The changes I made to it were slight changes, not to the characters themselves but only to the fields that identify the font file to the system. The fields were called "Family", "Sub-Family", "Full Name", "Postscript Name", "Identifier", "Version", "Style", "Weight Class", "Width", and maybe some others. I tried different combinations of those fields until I found one that worked for each combination of operating system and application. To make those changes, I think I used either a shareware font editor, maybe "High Logic Font Creator" or "DW Emett's Softy", or else maybe Microsoft's free "Font Properties Editor".

Happy belated birthday, Richard. Courage! Does Autocad have some way to create a DWG file that can't be altered? I don't know of any, and this recent Autodesk forum decries the lack of one: http://discussion.autodesk.com/thread.jspa?threadID=407217 Binding xref's doesn't do it. At most you have to explode the block made from the xref, and then you can edit anything. The DWF format was created as Autodesk's way to distribute non-editable files, competing with the PDF format. And I think even DWF isn't secure if the recipient really wants to alter the drawing and buys software to convert it back to DWG. But they give out a free DWF Writer that's supposed to make DWF files from any Windows application, in case you want to try that. You can't open a DWF file in Autocad and use it as a reference, which I gather is what you want your recipients to be able to do. That's apparently really hard, to make a true cad file that's locked. And think of the headaches it'll cause if they do it. Last-minute changes needed before printing, and somehow the file got locked and noone knows the password. What fun.

Yes, that's how you do it, and it works. I've been doing it regularly since 2000. The only trick is coaxing Autocad to display lineweights, which it definitely can do if you have the patience. There are a lot of different settings, and they keep changing them. In all versions, you have to turn on "display lineweight" in one of the dozens of tabs in the giant "Options" window, and also set how heavily to show them. But I think that only affects ModelSpace. In model space, zooming versus lineweight works the opposite of what you'd expect, making thick lines thicker as you zoom out, quickly becoming an unreadable mess, and thinner as you zoom in, quickly becoming undistinguishable. Autocad only shows lineweights properly in Layout tabs, and only if you set a lot of things correctly. In the print setup window for the Layout, you have to select "Plot Object Lineweights". That affects on-screen display as well as print-out. And set the plot style table to "None", and check a box right under that, called "Display plot styles". Very important! Even after you set everything else correctly, Autocad still assumes that you don't want to see what the drawing looks like, unless you tell it to "display plot styles". That also applies to the old system of colors to lineweights.

Yes, there should be unicode support, and I assume that there will be soon. Autocad has introduced it for version 2007. Until then, Thomas, perhaps you could use non-unicode Greek fonts, such as Symbol, Aisa, Aristarcoj, Galilee, and SPIonic. You would have to set your operating system for English or any other Latin-alphabet language, since non-unicode Greek fonts use the character codes for the Latin alphabet to draw Greek letters. And there might be some differences as to which key types which Greek letter. And if you wanted to use any Latin-alphabet language in the text, you would have to change to a different font, since non-unicode Greek fonts have only Greek letters. VectorWorks allows change of font in the middle of a text object. I don't know of any non-unicode Thai fonts, Arch16, but if you know of some then you could use the same workaround.