jan15

quote: Originally posted by GregG: There is and always shall be a great need for a healthy exchange of opinions. At last we agree. And like you, I'm turned off by fanaticism of any kind. Also by closed minds, stubbornness, and the refusal to think and to learn.

Mbuck, Thank you for your burlesque parody of my posting. I applaud the attempt at humor, which would have been a pleasant relief from the intellectually strenuous task of discussing software concepts if you had attempted that also.

Greg, I didn't miss your point. I refuted it with the very direct counter-point that using Xrefs to get a computer to do the drafting for you is a fantasy, and a masochistic fantasy at that, and in actual practice the avoidance of repetitive work can be done more efficiently and more comfortably with existing VectorWorks features than with Xrefs. I can't accuse you of having missed my point, but only because it's so obvious that you didn't try for it, not even bothering to read most of my posting. You implied that I don't understand Xrefs because I've never used them, though I've shown that I do understand them and said that they were the bane of my life for many years. You didn't address any of the issues I raised, filling your posting instead with your resume and a number of trite observations such as the importance of conserving time and the obsolescence of xerox details. You didn't add anything new to your own position either, except to extend the fantasy of automatic drafting into the area of automatic updating. But the fantasy there is exactly the same, and is equally incompatible with reality. The automatically updated details still have to be checked to see whether the update to the Xref has compromised the detail (unless you're just publishing a lot of junk details to bewilder contractors or justify your fee). When there's a need to adjust the Xref file to make the detail readable, as is nearly always the case unless the change doesn't affect that detail, the same abstract and indirect procedure has to be followed as when originally creating the detail. In VectorWorks, though perhaps not in AutoCad, making changes to the detail itself is quicker than working in file A to effect changes to file B. In both cases, making changes to the detail itself is a more natural and intuitive way to work, and more supportive of the essentially human and visually-oriented task of design and project oversight.

Thank you Ion! Every day I learn something new about this amazing program that I've been using for 5 years. P Retondo, I have 27 single keys that issue Menu Commands. Now there's something that really does enhance VectorWorks. Try it! A macro utility assigns the meaning Ctrl-V to the F2 key, Ctrl-C to the F3 key, etc. My keyboard has 12 extra function keys to which I can assign any meaning. I also macro the tilde, backslash, and Insert keys as commands, since I don't need them when typing texts. mgSimplify and EZ Macros are just two of dozens of cheap macro utilities for PC's. Quickeys for Mac's, a little pricier. Assign different meanings to the same key in different programs. Include longer sequences of keystrokes and even mouse action in the macro definition if you want. Define the macro on the fly, just by doing it while the macro utility watches and records your keystrokes. Focus FK-8200 and 9200 keyboards have 24 Function keys, 12 of them hardware programmable. They also have a built-in calculator on the keypad, which can send the calculated value to the cursor location.

Greg, I like the analogy to the xerox machine. The xerox is generally analogous to the computer in that way, a complex machine that took a lot of high-tech work to conceive and build, which we can use in a lower-tech way to avoid the boring repetitive part of various office tasks. In the specific case, the xerox as used with hand drafting was especially analogous to VectorWorks, in that it allowed you keep the focus on what you were designing, not on how to get the photocopier to work. Just walk over to it and press a button. But I don't remember anyone using it to xerox-enlarge part of a plan and stick it onto a detail sheet for that project. That would be the proper analogy to the Xref clip, wouldn't it? We commonly xerox'd details from another project's detail sheet and stuck them on rather than draw the exact same detail again, and we'd sometimes xerox and enlarge part of a general plan and then trace over it to produce a larger scale detail plan in the same set of drawings. But the correct analogy to both of those uses of the xerox machine is the copy/paste procedure described by Gareth. If we had xerox-enlarged part of the general plan and stuck it on as a detail, it would have been a very poor quality detail. The same is true of Xrefs, for the same reason. The larger scale drawing needs more detail than the smaller scale drawing, and different line weights. You can program AutoCad to show that part of the drawing differently in the two different viewports, but that's more work than what it takes in VectorWorks to make the necessary changes to the drawing. And it's a different kind of work, a kind of work that's more removed from the visually-oriented process of designing and drawing the project. Working on a drawing with an Xref in it is a bizarre and frustrating experience compared to the natural feel of working on a VectorWorks drawing. As each of the 9 years that I worked in AutoCad passed it seemed more bizarre and frustrating. The Xref is a major part of the drawing in front of you, but you can't alter it. You have to open another file and alter THAT drawing, if you still remember how you wanted to alter it, and then return to the first drawing and try to remember what you were doing when you discovered the need to alter the Xref. Not extremely hard if that's all you're doing, and maybe even pleasant if you enjoy computer programming or solving cryptograms. But if you have other things on your mind, such as designing a building, it's a very unpleasant distraction. As iboymatt said, the VectorWorks approach is good in a different way, and a lot of people really like that way. The feature you're talking about wouldn't add much to the VectorWorks system, even though it's absolutely essential in the AutoCad wasteland. We already have better ways to do what you're talking about. It isn't worth complicating the interface and introducing another source of bugs and another price increase, and we'd rather have the software designers spend their time enhancing the natural drawing process, perhaps bringing more of that same feel to 3D modelling.

The method I described above may sound complicated, but it's really very easy. I tried it before writing it down. The first circular arc I drew looked more than close enough for any construction purpose. The whole procedure took about fifteen seconds in VectorWorks 8. It probably wouldn't take much more than a minute in version 10. Note that the incredibly complex math on that web site also produces only an approximate value.

Kristen, You want to import sheet definitions and class settings to a file you've already filled with drawings? Everything you draw would have to be meticulously planned in advance to accept the sheet definitions and class settings. And don't you need the sheet definitions to help you switch between sheets while working on them? And the class settings to see that you're drawing everything in the right classes? In short, wouldn't it always be better to start out the drawing with the sheet definitions and class settings already in the file? i.e., by opening a template file.

The math for ellipses is pretty tough. See http://www.geom.umn.edu/docs/reference/CRC-formulas/node29.html So I would probably approximate it iteratively with circular arcs. To find a point 13'-4" = 160" = 13.33' from point P on the ellipse: 1. Draw a circle with center at P and radius 160. 2. Draw an arc (3 pt method) that approximates the elliptical arc between P and the intersection of the ellipse and the circle. 3. Check its arc length in ObjInfo 4. Adjust the arc's length with the Select tool till it equals 13.33' 5. If necessary, draw a new arc that more closely approximates the shape of the elliptical arc and repeat steps 3 and 4. 6. Repeat step 5 till you feel you're close enough.

As always, the thread is divided between those of us who like the fact that VW is uncomplicated and allows us to do the drafting ourselves quickly and easily, and those of them who want to complicate it AutoCad-style so they can torment themselves and fantasize that they're getting the computer to do the drafting for them. The only solution is to provide another version of VectorWorks, as per my original suggestion. The new complicated version could be much more expensive, since it will have all the features of a $3400 product. And then when people write in to the Wish List to ask for Xref's, Viewports, Color Numbers, or Command Line input, Katie can just say, "That's available in VectorWorks Masochist".

quote: Originally posted by Bruce Brooks: ... using the numeric keypad to press the enter key require the right-handed mouser to make unecessary motions ... Or to mouse with the left hand, which turns out to be just as easy as with the right hand after at most a week's practice. Of course, if avoiding any change in your life is more important than drawing much more quickly and effortlessly, don't do it. quote: ... comparing wishlist items to AC and automatically dismssing those requests ... No comments have been made in this thread dismissing requests because of their similarity to AutoCad. It was the original posting, by Mbuck, which brought up the comparison of the wish items to AutoCad, and made that the basis of the wish items, not a dismissal of them. My replies only said that the similarity shouldn't be a reason to recommend them. These forums are much more valuable if you actually read them.

quote: Originally posted by Kaare Baekgaard: ... drag & drop image files into vectorworks ... You can Copy and Paste them in. Copy the selected part of the bitmap image in Photoshop or whatever, then Paste it into VectorWorks.

Yes, that feature could just be tacked on to VectorWorks, couldn't it? Or better still, how about a new specialty version (like VectorWorks Architect, VectorWorks Mechanical, etc.) which incorporates all those great math-intensive analytical drafting tools that we remember from AutoCad -- ViewPorts, PaperSpace, DimScale, LinetypeScale, and if you zoom inside a viewport that changes its scale, and you have to keep pressing Enter and sometimes a variety of subcommand letters in a prescribed series of steps in order to carry out an operation, and so on. You could call it VectorWorks Masochist.

Excellent question. And the same problem exists in Windows. Ordinarily you can specify which program file opens data files with a particular filename extension, by using the File Types tab in Folder Options. But you can't associate .mcd files with a different version of VectorWorks. Every time I've tried to do that I've gummed up the system so thoroughly that I had to uninstall both versions and then purge the registry before re-installing.

Katie, I can't find anything like that in the 2D Tools palette of VW 10, nor in the Dimensioning palette, and not even in the full list of tools in the Workspace Editor. Can you give us the name of the tool?

You could boomerang it. Hold the space bar while double tapping Select. When you let go you're still in the other tool.

I agree with item 11. Some of those functions would make a valuable addition if they're not too difficult to incorporate and wouldn't interfere with the already very good system of class/layer management. Many of the other items seem trivial to me. I can think of dozens of enhancements that would be more valuable than these, but which I still wouldn't burden the wish list with. It's difficult enough just trying to learn and remember all the capabilities the program already has. Of course, I'm no Jorn Utzon or Mbuck. Item 3 seems especially unnecessary. The present VectorWorks system of snapping to points is superb, and certainly much faster and easier than the AutoCad system, even with the many AutoLisp enhancements for it that I collected and created over the years. In VectorWorks I keep 5 constraints active all the time, with no confusion about what's being snapped to and almost never having to zoom in. The introductory comment that "AutoCad still has a much more efficient 2D drafting interface" is absurd, particularly for the use of the word "still". AutoCad has been scrambling to catch up with VectorWorks, adding half-baked copies of features which have always been part of VectorWorks' interface. Consider Grips, the Match Properties tool, "Tools" (in name only), Toolbars, the useless imitation of the Group command, "hand" panning, Layout windows, to name a few. There's even a default white background now for AutoCad's Layout windows, and yet item 7 is hawking the old DOS black screen for VectorWorks! You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink Perrier.

Mbuck, I haven't missed the point. I just disagree with you. And I haven't written from the point of view of advising Nemetschek on their marketing strategy because they never asked me. But since you insist: I would say that from a marketing standpoint it's much more important that when people switch, for whatever reason, they find an excellent product, as I did, and therefore won't want to switch again. The product is in fact excellent; the only question is whether people will find that excellence. If it's buried in an AutoCad skin they won't. Apart from the question of whether those 12 items are the most urgently needed improvements, they certainly won't entice any AutoCad users to switch. I don't know what will, if the much lower price and being blown away by the things they see me accomplish with it haven't done the trick. Maybe a whip and a dark room. That's actually about what it took to get me to try something new, even though I had always felt that AutoCad was a poorly designed piece of software and that any other CAD program must surely be better. I think the reason I resisted change is that learning AutoCad was a painful ordeal and I didn't want to lose my investment, and also I didn't want to go through the same ordeal with another program. And I think I see the same type of resistance in other AutoCad users. I've managed to persuade several friends to try VectorWorks. They did so kicking and screaming, and constantly came crying to me that they couldn't implement the mickey mouse procedures they had always used in AutoCad. Each time, I asked them what they were trying to accomplish, and showed them a much better way to accomplish it using the greater range of capabilities in VectorWorks. In the end they all thanked me and went out into the world trying to proselytize others. The VectorWorks interface doesn't throw itself in your face all the time, as AutoCad's does. It's a quiet, understated interface, but with every nook and cranny crammed full of valuable tools. That's what makes it so easy to learn (it's non-intimidating) and so quick and comfortable to use (it's uncluttered). But that also makes it easy to overlook features, to never learn what it can do even after years of use. We have to keep opening tiny doors to see what jewels are stashed there, and then learn what we can do with them. And we have to share those discoveries with each other. I think that's what these forums are really for, not for dictating a 12-point Master Plan that will rescue Nemetschek from a dilemma they haven't said they're in. Since you've felt free to speculate about both my profession and my CAD experience, and to use your wildly inaccurate guesses to imply that I can't possibly understand the real world of serious grown-up stuff, I may as well tell you this: it looks to me as though you're still in the kicking and screaming stage. I think you need to relax, open your mind to new ways of producing drawings, and discover what VectorWorks can do, possibly asking people in the forum for advice. I could be wrong. I haven't done much land survey or civil engineering work since switching to VectorWorks. Maybe it's not as good for that. But I've used it for a wide variety of other purposes, and I've found it to be very good for all of them, above all 2D drafting. And I don't want Nemetschek to dumb down their product to please a few squeaky wheels who refuse to learn it.

What I've always found is that while editing a group I can snap to other objects on the same layer as the group, but can't snap to objects on other layers. Sometimes I wish I could.

quote: Originally posted by Mbuck: ... most prominent contemporary public buildings ... are not entirely on an orthogonal ... Yes, that's exactly what I said. They're NOT ENTIRELY orthogonal. I said "primarily", but I'll accept your stronger statement, that the built environment is almost entirely orthogonal. Every building has at least a few lines that aren't on any grid, and many of them have multiple grids, as do the campuses and land developments you mentioned, but none of that detracts from the fact that the great majority of the lines we draw are perpendicular to a lot of other lines nearby. We build a Sydney Opera House or a Bilbao Guggenheim every so often, but only after building a few hundred thousand plainer buildings. And VectorWorks appropriately places the coordinates that we need constantly ahead of the ones we use only occaisionally.

Pressing the shortcut key for the Select tool twice deselects everything.

quote: Originally posted by Mbuck: ... L (Length) and A (Angle) ... should be in the initial tab positions, and X and Y should be last ... To speed up 2D drafting especially for drawing lines and wall segments. ... The built environment -- rooms, wall and roof surfaces, floor and ceiling grids, doors, windows, cabinets, bricks, boards, panels of all kinds, stair treads, parking stalls, city streets, beams, ducts, grilles, light fixtures, switch plates, and on and on -- is made up primarily of things with edges at right angles to each other. The X and Y coordinates specify the lengths of those orthogonal edges, either along the width and height of the screen, or else along some rotated pair of axes as determined by the Grid Angle option of the Set Grid command. Far fewer things that we build or use in construction are departures from the orthogonal system, and so the L and A coordinates, which accomodate them, rightfully have a secondary place in the data display bar. If you want to speed up 2D drafting, try using the Enter key on the numeric keypad instead of the Tab key to select a coordinate box. The numeric keypad is by far the fastest way to enter numeric data, as any bookeeper knows, and VectorWorks takes full advantage of that by providing this function of the keypad Enter key. Hit Enter once for X and twice for Y, filling in X or Y or both, as you wish. Try using rectangles instead of lines for layout, and AddSurface, ClipSurface, and Reshape to form more complex shapes. With these methods you can easily lay out 4 edges in less time than it now takes you to draw one.

John, I apologize for the sarcastic tone of my previous posting. The mention of office guide sheets and standards brought up unpleasant memories, and I was probably reacting more to Bruce's accusation at that same time but in another thread that I'm trying to force everyone back to MiniCad version 4 and Intel 286 processors. I can see that you're making a sincere and thoughtful effort to adapt to VectorWorks methods and to address problems you have. I should have asked Bruce what particular problems have come up in developing guide sheets and standards, rather than assuming that he was making a contrived argument. These forums are much more productive if we discuss the issues in specific detail. Since you've provided that detail, I now understand where the shoe pinches. I, too, do a lot of color renderings, and I know how poorly HP printers and plotters match screen colors, each model distorting them in its own way (at least in Windows; I don't remember having this problem when working on Macs with Epson printers, but it may exist there also.) Like you, I keep printed color charts on my desk, correlate them with colors on the displayed palette, and use different color charts for different project types and clients, importing the appropriate chart into each file. And you're right: that problem of printers not matching screen colors hamstrings the system of visual selection of colors. I've had to learn which of the shades of grey prints out properly for each purpose, and to pick them on that basis rather than on the basis of what looks good on screen. When picking them, I think of them as grey1, grey2, grey3, etc. Similarly, I can't just pick custom colors that look right on screen, but instead must pick them by position on the chart, correlating them with my printed charts. I use the 5th row of each of my custom color charts for custom colors associated with that project type, and I think of them as custom1 through custom16. That can be arduous when I have a lot of custom colors to choose from or if two or more are very similar, and especially when using the tiny color charts in Layers and Classes. I don't think of this as a major problem, and I still hope that the solution will be a larger chart in Layers and Classes, and possibly some black lines or wider grey spaces to break up the long rows and columns of 16 into smaller groups to make visual selection and correlation easier, and I hope above all that it will not be a change to a system that requires the use of numbers; but I would have responded very differently if I had known the details of your problem. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Henry, I like your idea. I can't speak for the others, of course, but I think that custom color scripts would help the problems I've had as discussed above. Can you provide more information? I've never worked with VectorScript, but have a lot of other programming experience. [ 02-22-2003, 04:58 PM: Message edited by: jan15 ]

If this option were added, where would it be found on the screen? As an optional pull-down menu command, or cluttering up the Attributes palette? Regardless of how it's implemented, the AutoCad hold-outs will start complaining that they can't see what color 173 looks like, and they'll want to see the numbers on the color chart, under each color, hopelessly cluttering that up. It's not true that a color-by-number option won't affect the graphically oriented interface. In fact, everything that's added has some impact, and so there should be restraint, adding only features that really enhance the software, not features that throw it back to the DOS era. And what will offices do with color numbers in these "guide sheets/standards" anyway? Start assigning plotter pen widths to each color? If you want to force other people into your mold, can't you just give them a template file with your 125 different class colors already assigned?

But Bruce, I never said anything against the Wall tool, or against plug-in symbols, 3D CAD, or technological advancement in general. I spoke in favor of the Rectangle tool as opposed to the Line tool, and in conjunction with the particular task of laying out shapes and dimensions (which is the only task that this issue of coordinate entry affects significantly). In earlier posts in this thread I said I wouldn't mind if L and A were the first coordinates for the Line and Wall tools, since I don't often use Lines to lay out geometry, and since when I use the Wall tool I'm usually snapping to constraint points on complex 2D shapes that I've already created by Adding and Clipping rectangles and then editing with the Reshape tool. The reason for the latter is that when working in plan I normally design spaces rather than walls. I believe that's still common practice even in the most up-to-date architectural offices. And I leave those space-defining Polylines in the drawing even after Walls are placed, for area calculations if nothing else, but also usually for hatching or color fill to show flooring materials or functional relationships. And spaces in buildings are overwhelmingly either rectangles or else complex shapes made up of rectangles, with an occaisional trapezoid here and there. That's the core of the argument for X and Y first. The built environment -- rooms, wall and roof surfaces, doors, windows, bricks, stair treads, switch plates, whatever -- is still made up primarily of things with edges at right angles to each other. It's nice to occaisionally have other angles as well, as much as we can afford them, in fact; but it's silly to alter the program to make a rarely-used task easier to perform than one that's used all the time. And since the built environment is still in that primitive state, even after several generations of Star Trek, it would usually be faster even for you, and even if you start out by drawing walls rather than rooms, to specify their length by hitting Enter once for screen width or twice for screen height. The coordinate entry alone would suffice to define the wall's length. You wouldn't have to combine coordinate entry with mouse movement. Also in this thread, I already answered your question about drawing rectangles at odd angles, i.e. by use of Constrain Angle (or by various other methods of rotating them after drawing, if there are only a few rectangles at the odd angle) or by setting Grid Angle (to draw a whole wing skewed at 10 degrees). These also are very quick methods; and they make layout even of skewed geometry faster with rectangles than with any method using lines and L coordinates. [ 02-21-2003, 02:49 PM: Message edited by: jan15 ]

I agree with Jim. Color numbers are crude, and would clash with the otherwise refined VectorWorks interface. Like adding a hand starting crank to a Lexus. Even if you're accustomed to driving a Model T, a crank is still not a good thing to put on a Lexus. Better to relax and get used to the electric starter. However, as far as the size and legibility of the color chart, for both young and old eyes: It does seem odd that although a huge color chart pops up from the Attributes palette, the one that pops up in the Classes and Layers setup dialog boxes is microscopic, less than one third of the area of the other. Wouldn't it be better to have a medium-size color chart and use the same one in all cases?