jan15
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Posts posted by jan15
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That keystroke-monitoring thing would be good in Dilbert's office, to detect people like Wally who sleep all day. But of course Wally would just get a "drinking bird" toy and set it to continually tap one of the keys.
Joseph Heller, in a novel about the time when he worked for AT&T, had a co-worker point out to the protagonist that you can walk around the office all day doing nothing as long as you carry a sheet of paper.
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Not at all, Christiaan. You're perfectly reasonable and rational in your desire to surge ahead with rational-based training. Those emotional comments were made by unreasonable men. Unreasonable people are often emotional.
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The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
- George Bernard Shaw
Only an unreasonable man would refuse to conform to the office standard style of working.
The reasonable man will not only conform to published office standards, as David suggested, but will also discover and conform to undocumented aspects of the standard style of working, which Petri equated to office standards. The unreasonable man will find ways to conform to the published standards but work around them in a way that nobody ever thought of before. That makes extra work for the CAD manager, who has to publish new standards to prevent it, and who will thereafter be gunning for the unreasonable man.
In short, the unreasonable man had better look into self-employment, or employment in what NNA used to call "the smart-sized firm."
The real point of the testing discussed here is to avoid hiring unreasonable men. But a good interviewer can do that with general questions that evoke conformist or non-conformist responses. The unreasonable man is unreasonable about everything, not only about CAD work.
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Autocad Layers are similar to VW Classes, not similar to VW Layers. You should Import DXF Layers as Classes, then keep that class structure while working on the file, and Export Classes as DXF Layers.
Autocad doesn't have layers, but it has a Modelspace which is something like a Design Layer, except that there can only be one in a file and it can only be scaled 1:1. So you should continue using a single Design Layer, but keep the objects in the various Classes just as in the DXF file.
Autocad also has Layouts, which are something like Sheet Layers, and a file can have multiple Layouts. Each Layout can have objects drawn on the layout, in "paperspace", and it can also have Viewports looking into Modelspace. Not all Autocad users take advantage of the option to have multiple Layouts in a file, and some don't use Layouts at all. You should replicate whatever your client does. Do you have a good DWG viewer? You could use that to check the client's file structure. Or ask. If the client is using Layouts and Viewports, you should use corresponding Sheet Layers and Viewports.
Autocad has its own type of fonts, SHX shape fonts, which no other software uses. If the client is using SHX fonts, there might be a translation issue. Autocad can use TTF TrueType fonts now, though it runs slower with them than with SHX fonts.
And always import into a blank file, to make sure you're not adding anything inadvertently. If you want to add things advertently, you can paste them in later.
Sometimes large file sizes point to large numbers of unused Symbols, which were unused Autocad blocks in the DXF file. Some Autocad users store their entire library of blocks in every drawing file, and sometimes that extra baggage takes up more file space after an export than before the import. So purging might help, if that won't offend the client.
Other than that, I don't know what to suggest about the large file size. Tell us more about what's in the files. What types of objects in large quantity, and what surface treatment.
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You install a font by dragging the .ttf file into the system Fonts folder - C:\Windows\Fonts, or Start > Settings > Control Panel > Fonts. Then you have to re-start VW to get it to recognize the new font.
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Though it's called "import," it's really VW's way of opening a DWG file. So it tries to keep everything exactly as in the DWG. That's the reason for it, I believe, and it's why we always import into a blank file. It turns the blank file into an accurate VW version of the DWG file, and you can use that in various ways as Katie described to bring the information into your own file.
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Autodesk made Truetype versions of Txt and many other standard SHX fonts (Monotxt, Simplex, Complex, RomanC/D/S/T, and the various ISO, Sy, Gothic, & Italic fonts), and installs them with Autocad. Install means putting the TTF file in the system's Fonts folder. So you should be able to find them on the other computers at work. Just copy them into your own system Fonts folder, and then re-start VectorWorks.
Good luck avoiding AC. It's frustrating when you share files with AC users, because you have to limit yourself to data types that Autocad can use.
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Architxt.ttf, a Truetype version of an SHX font. By the former "Digital Archtitect Software Company." NOT the easier-to-find one by S. G. Moye and also called Architext, which is not a hand-lettered font at all.
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Construction terms vary within a country also, and even within a state in the US. When I worked as a carpenter in a small town in Missouri, I had to use the term "sidewall" for the structures that separate one room from another. They thought the word "partition" only applied to bathroom stalls. And the notched 2x12's that support a flight of stairs were called "stair horses." There were lots of other local construction terms that I had to learn. Creating a BIM standard is a bit like building the tower of Babel.
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With a viewport. Or with a white-filled rectangle with a rectangular hole in it (by Clip Surface tool), placed above the image or on a layer that's above the image's layer.
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To set the Dimension Style that will be used when creating new dimension objects, pull down File > Preferences > Document Preferences > Dimensions tab. The style showing in the box is the one that will be used.
In that same tab, you can also create a new Custom Dimension Style, or Edit one, by clicking on Custom.
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It takes fewer bytes to store the insertion point and attributes of a symbol insertion than to store the endpoints and attributes of the lines that make up the symbol definition. Even if the symbol consists of only one line, as long as there are many instances of that one line you'll save a little file space by using a symbol instead of just copying the line.
For convenience as well as smaller file size, you might consider nested symbols -- make a symbol that consists of one tile, and then make another symbol that consists of an array of insertions of the first symbol. Anything that will be repeated several times in the drawing is fair game for symbols.
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When I get that kind of response from web sites in general (I haven't tried NNA mailing lists, but I have seen this happen with VW forum sign-in), it's usually because my browser, Firefox, has rejected cookies without asking me, based on some earlier incident that it interpreted to mean I want it to do so. Could something like that be the problem?
With Firefox, the solution is to find the site in the list of "Exceptions" to "Accept cookies from sites" and remove it.
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In AC they can select everything from your section viewport, block it, insert the block in modelspace at the inverse of the scale of the drawing, and explode. Or, eliminating the block, just cut and paste into modelspace and then Scale the pasted stuff up. (Some AC users don't know about cut and paste yet.)
They'll probably ask why you can't switch to working in 2D in order to save them those few seconds of extra work.
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Brilliant, Mr Gog! You must have read the manual, to know a thing like that. Thanks for sharing it.
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There should be a couple of buttons next to that, and if you select the other one the display changes to length and angle instead of X and Y coordinates.
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When you paste in VW, objects retain their classes just as in AC (though AC uses the term "layer" for that), whether they're in a symbol or not.
AC doesn't have layers in the sense that VW does, but it does have tabs, which have some of the same function as VW layers. When you paste something in AC it's pasted onto the current tab regardless of what tab it was on in the source file. In VW, it's pasted onto the current layer regardless of what layer it was on in the source file.
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archirev, are you in Antarctica? (lat -80.86239 long 35.20964)
That was Old-Petri who made the nasty comment about "incompetent draftsmen" back in January. He changed while you were away into Nice-Petri, a very pleasant and helpful contributor to the forum.
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Let's not forget that this problem only arises because the Select tool can also move and copy objects, without issuing a command or changing to another tool. And that's a very good feature, whose benefits far outweigh the occasional inconveniences described here.
If separate Select-Only and Move/Copy-Only tools were added, to prevent these problems, what percent of the time would you use those, and what percent of the time would you use the traditional Select tool that does it all?
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There wasn't a viewer until v9, and it won't open older version files. Here's a zip file with v2000 DWG files of your drawings. Plot object lineweights, no plot style table needed.
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1 libra pondo (pound) = .45 kg
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You could get what you want easily by drawing a 1" dia. circle inscribed in the square, then dragging one edge of the square to the center of the circle and using the Add Surface command.
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Agreed. Arch and Struc drawings often show the same detail, with focus on different aspects. The only reason to publish separate details is to establish who's responsible for what aspect, by whose seal is on each drawing.
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It's not built into VW, so you would have to buy a separate macro utility, which you can then use to customize all your software. There are lots of them available, some free, most others with a 30 day free trial. I use MacroExpress, though I might as well have gone with its cheaper sibling KeyboardExpress, since I never use the extra features.
It's very easy to learn and use. For any shift-key combination, or any sequence of shift-keys and other keystrokes that I use a lot, I simply record, or "capture" it while doing it once. I press Ctrl-Alt-Shift-X, then do the operation I want to capture, then Ctrl-Alt-Shift-X again, then name it and assign a hotkey to it on the window that pops up, and choose whether I want it to work only in this program or globally in all programs. That's it. From then on, whenever I press that hotkey I get a playback of that sequence of keystrokes.
In VW I just use it to assign menu commands to my 24 unshifted function keys. But many or most of the special features people request in the Wish List could be done with a keyboard macro. in MS Word I often capture a long sequence involving search/replace and other editing, and then use the macro to make some revision to a whole file in a few seconds.
VectorWorks quiz questions for current and potential employees
in General Discussion
Posted
We who were born with dowel rods in every hardware store can make fun of putting square pegs in round holes, but when pegs were the standard way to join wood they did just that, for the reasons Brudgers named. A carpenter would hand drill a round hole, then rough cut a square peg, quickly trim the corners with a knife, and hammer it into the round hole, crushing it into shape. He just had to have an eye to how big the peg had to be to make a tight joint but not split the wood.