Joe Newell

Speaking of teleportation (The Fly et al.) Here's a little ditty that might amuse you. I teleported home one night with Ron and Sue and Meg. Ron stole Megan's heart away and I got Susan's leg.

Further to the A440 thing. I don't see how a transmogrification of sound waves which require a medium and electromagnetic waves which don't can be possible even by multiplying some number by another number however big. There's something missing here. Besides we're going backwards as it were, trying to convert a VW drawing into music. one being a collection of fluorescing pixels and the other being a collection of pressure waves. Not that it is necessarily music. keep your thinking caps on.

Self extracting archives and even stuffit archives sometimes look like viruses to virus scanning software and about half of the emails we send with these archives came back as rejected by the receivers vrus scan. We gave up and send things uncompressed now.

Yes!!Why not .vcd or .vwd shed your mminicad roots just like you shed the bearded guy tooling away at his computer step right up for the brave new world.

See KatieSee Katie SellSell, Katie, Sell You are right of course, It doesn't seem that long ago since we got VW 8 so I forget that pretty much everyone else is way beyond that now. I will definitely take a look at the latest. Thanks

That last one may be the one I need.I seem to have created a monster.What is A440 anyway. I was watching a re-run of Star Trek TNG last night (are there any other sorts?) Where Data was asked to sculpt music. Needless to say he missed the point as it required a certain amount of imagination and creativity and only maganed a well exucuted treble cleff. But what we're seeing here is a transmutation of sorts between genres or something of the like. What fun eh

This has been dealt with to some extent before. I sometimes want to import scanned images into a VW drawing, for example scanned people into an elevation view. What do I need to do to the image either before or after importing to ensure that the rectangular shaped object that the image imports as does not occlude what's behind. That is I want to have just the person in the drawing, not the sheet that the person image is on. Do you follow??? I thought it was a photoshop solution but I can't figure out how to just select the image and mmake a new file for it without the rectangular page. I sort of got it when I managed to make the entire image transparent so that only the lines of the image appear in VW but this ghost solution is only half way there. I copped out eventually and drew a poly line around the person to hide the VW objects behind (time consuming... and in the case of tree images, really really time consuming) Any easy fixes? Or is this something you just can't do (JCD)?

why don't you start your scanner up and then tap the scanner bed with a hammer, lightly, you don't want all the bits falling into your scanner and spoiling the insides. before you start you might want to find out if you can get replacement glass for your scanner. putting 3m safety film on a piece of glass and tapping that will make a lovely broken glas pattern that you can then scan. The safety film keeps the glass all together. Just a thought if you can't find an image. A month ago I could have done it for you because I had a bunch of old windows in my back yard from a house renovation, complete with spidery cracks and safety film.

This is the wish list Garry, maybe you could post your queries under the General Discussion Section. Meanwhile, you take a chain saw, see

Adobe type reunion deluxe is what we have on our Macs to organize the fonts we use most in Vectorworks into groups. It still showss you the other fonts available (useful when you want to do some graphic design with different fonts) but since we only use Tecton or Univers most of the time, it shows those two fonts and all their sub fonts under separate headings in the font pull down menu. Very useful

haha waddya know! Thanks I wonder if I can get a learning unit for that in our continuing education program

I was wondering if there is a way to get the length of a line that is not perfectly horizontal or vertical without having to dimennsion it. Just curious.

http://www3.telus.net/bsainc/bgThis guy I mean

Oh and by the way... Is it possible (or has it been fixed in a newer version) to have a selection process whereby when you use a marquee to select a number of objects by "crossing" them, you can avoid selecting objects which are off the screen and invisible but whose grips (rectangular array) fall within the marquee and so are unknowingly selected and modified as well. Too many times I have moved things all over the place when I wanted them to stay put.

Thank you Katie. I forgot to mention I was on 8.5.2 though you may remember from my numerous other rants. I didn't ask to see if this issue has been addressed in the latest version. I also didn't really say what I meant by Real Auto Save which doesn't ask if you want to save but just goes ahead and does it, hence the temporary SV$ file so you don't overwrite. Another thing I liked from Autocad is a .bak file system where each time you save your drawing, Autocad, saves the old version to a file with a .bak extension. Simple. You don't have to save as a new file name if there is something you want to preserve in the old one. It only worked for one previous version of a file but that helped loads. Any chance of something similar appearing in VW? I'd also like to say I think VW got it bang on with the classes and layers system. Something Autocad only got half right and only in a convoluted way with Model Space and Paper Space. Don't ever change it. I guess this is all heading in the direction of a hybrid program which uses the best bits of each program and discards all the dross. Other key points: - 3d, easy in Autocad (fun even)(easy as x y z)- 3d, incomprehensible in Vectorworks.- shortcut keys. AC has the option to include 2 keystrokes which means you can shortcut more commands and actually give them shortcut keys that make sense. In VW I am limited to single keys which once that letter is taken I can use no more. Maybe I want to use TR for trim and TX for text , for instance.or RT for rotate and RE for rectangle etc etc etc. Speaking of which, understanding that the workspaces are fully custimizable, why do the default workspaces that VW comes with, have such nonsensical shortcuts. It is easier to remember and learn if your shortcuts have some relation to the command they represent.Mousing off the menus is too slow, I would rather have a shortcut for each and every command. If they made sense it would be a snap to learn them. Any comments?

Well given that VW is the program that we're all using now... I prefer it on Windows XP to the MAC OS9.2.2 I have at work. I run the program on both at different times and have never had downtime on XP. I have had lots on my Mac but that problem seems to be getting resolved bit by bit. I typically work on largish architectural drawings 4-5MB in size. I think I may have a lemon MAC, so perhaps I am not the one to comment. Also, my PC is 1.1 GHz and has oodles of memory which may help too. I noticed on an older PC that VW tended to get slower and slower until everything just ground to a halt and I had to restart. I was running Win 98 on that machine and the machine was seriously underpowered for VW.. Bottom line, given what limited experience I have, I agree with Katie. Big, fast, PC with lots of memory, running XP and VW seems more stable to me.

Actually, It was a consultant who pointed out the problem to us. We sent him a dwg file exported from VW, whenit arrived at his computer via e-mail it was a midi file. We then sent the file to ourselves to see where the switch was occuring and it arrived in our mailbox as a quicktime audio file. We're on Mac's, he's on a PC. It is a mystery because we have done this a thousand times before and nothing like this has ever happened. Which poses the question... Is there a point when computer technology reaches a complexity where software has the ability to re-write itself, and even writing new programs that alter the way a computer behaves???? Not so much terminator as a short story I once read about a com satellite that starts to re-program itself having reached a critical mass of complexity. blah blah blah. I apologize I am taking up space here. The music thing went away when I generated the DWG file from my own computer. It must be Samantha who is the problem. I will go and beat her.

the last bit was a joke of course. Seriously though it is an audio file with no sound. We are using Netscape 4.7 mail client but have never had this same problem before. help!

We are trying to export a dwg file for Autocad 14 from VW 8.5.2. For some reason when we send it via e-mail to our consultants it arrives in their systems as a quicktime audio file. When played on quicktime (out of curiosity bred from total frustration) we were delighted to here Bad Moon Rising by CCR. Any suggestions???

Well kiwiross, having been forced to use both systems by vvarious bosses. I would lean towards a PC system running Autocad. Not exactly an answer to your question but really how many bugs does a systems and a program have to have before a software publisher and designer can be held accountable for the downtime they are responsible for . Seriously I figure I have spent the better part of 1 1/2 months in 4 years rebooting or restarting VW or reconstructing lost drawings once I had to redraw a sheet of details because a fun little routine in minicad that rounded everything off to one inch increments before I realized what the question was.

I need an auto save feature. Not this half assed effort we have so far, where it asks you whether you want to save and highlights the "no" key by default. What goods that? When I am rushing which I always am, I hit return and it doesn't save. and two minutes later it crashes and I lose everything. I want an auto save that actually saves the drawing to a temporary file that I can make the current drawing if I lose everything in a crash. Autocad's had it for eons. Autocad saves a backup as a .sv$ file so you don't overwrite the drawing you are working in until you are ready.

duh, sorry for the first stupid question. Let me see if there are answers to my others

First of all is there a search option in this site to search for similar topics? Or do I have to scroll through several hundred other questions to find something similar? Secondly, since I haven't looked all the way to see if there is an answer to my question...(time is money after all) How do I get all the fonts available to me on my Mac system to appear in Vectorworks? Someone else set up three computers in this office and he left before explaining. Now we have two new comps and I have to set up VW on them. I get some fonts but not the Univers group that we are using in our drawings. Is this an adobe type manager issue? Is there a preference someowhere that I turn on or off. Also a computer that was previously running fine with all text appearing anti-aliased is now showing all the text using this same Univers font all jagged. It prints fine but you can't read it on the screen. Again, is this an ATM issue. It is only a problem in Vectorworks. I am very frustrated with all this.Makes me want to take up basketweaving or pot farming.

Why don't you just open Vectorworks by clicking on the file you want to open? Or maybe that's a stupid answer.

Hate to say it Katie, but while the fix that you suggested to my freezing issue, solved the problem for as long ass it hass been since my last post...(04.11.2002)(you suggested upgrading to 9.2.2 and getting the latest vid card drivers) It has now started crashing in the same way with the same frequency (30 seconds). Again I am running VW 8.5.2 on a Mac G4 with OS 9.2.2, ATI video card (I don't know exactly what since my mac was shipped without the insides listed). It freezes when I am trying to move an object any object, any size. Even when I am not scrolling off the screen while moving it freezes, and it freezes within 30-40 seconds of restarting VW.Does disk fragmentation have a part in this because I am going to defrag tonight when I am out of the office to see if this helps. I have severe fragmentation apparently. Anything else that anyone can suggext would help too. Please don't tell me my computer is about to die Thankks