Petri

Even the simplest things can be difficult for members of gun lobbies. No, let me start again: Members of gun lobbies are idiots.

This must be one of the more difficult things for a Windows-user to understand: capturing a rectangular area on the Clipboard is a piece of cake on the Mac and has been for years. It is unfortunate that neither Christiaan or his boss have not known about basic OS features; that does not make Windows any better, though. Yes, I reckon. You don't seem to.

It does, indeed: with it you can ruin your VW-file in an instant!

Ahh - finally the mystery of Land's End is solved! As a schoolboy, that was as fascinating a place name to me as Tananarive, Sulawesi or Mahagonny. For the benefit of VW users in geographically larger countries than the fly-speck of the United Kingdom of Prydain Fawr (England, Wales, Scotland, Cornwall and various isles, I gather) and Northern Ireland: there may be Zones. When the spherical world is projected to Cartesian coordinates, only a limited area can be dealt with in any reasonable accuracy. Eg. in Awstraya, one cannot have an accurate and meaningful Facilities Management CAD-map of one's home in Toorak, Melbourne Victoria, the beach house in the North Coast of New South Wales, the crocodile hunting lodge near Darwin, Northern Territory of South Australia and the Festival Pad in Adelaide, South Australia.

Excuse me? Surely your site cannot be that close to the origin of your national mapping grid! But then again, Greenwich happens to be located in GMT 0 time zone.

Don't take that as legal advice, though... In this country a person can, I believe, legally use a software licence in all his or her computers, but only in one at a time. In your country, whatever it is, the legislation may be different. The Licencing Agreement is, per se, unambiguous: one licence, one installation. Notwithstanding, the (sensible) advice by Tech Support suggests that NNA is not going to sue you if you happen to among the 5% of the world's population living in the U.S. of A. If you reside in Elbonia, I'd be very, very careful.

No, it's not. You have the selected objects, not a selected area.

Not sure what you mean.

Does it? (I don't use Mail.) But aren't OS PDFs of raster type?

Anything you can do, I can do better: to copy a selected area to the Clipboard on the Mac press Command-Shift-Control-4. Works with all programs both ways. OK - maybe you can't paste a picture to some programs.

Both seem to work when imported as metres.

A structure for a class that will hold at least 20 Libras?

There are several schools - actually warring tribes - on this subject. In principle, the "winder" configuration of any flavour should not be used anywhere. If one must use it, the stair should go up clockwise. (Being a sinister person, I'd prefer it the other way around, but as we all know, 99% of people are right-handed and 1% are geniuses.) If we are talking about internal stairs in houses or units, the tread depth (= the magic formula) should apply at a curve that is 350?450 mm from the right hand side handrail when descending. And what, prey tell, is the magic formula? Well, of course it is the "sum of two risers + one tread = 610 to 630 mm". Or is it? Every textbook I've had the pleasure to know considers ascension - "nosing" is a good example of this. But what goes up, must come down. The magic is not necessarily magical when descending, especially not to us old, frail and even partially movement-challenged. (OK: I'm an aging cripple! Happy now?) At this point of time I can only question Dr. Neufert's theories; the proof may well be in the form of yours truly dying because of wrong stair geometry or the "nosing". Meanwhile: the riser should never exceed 160 millimetres. I'm working on the formula, but the older the occupant, the smaller the sum should be. And hey, kids: if you don't provide the so-called wheel chair access at 5% (maybe 8% with special provisions), one day you'll descend to a place where you'll be broken on a wheel. While descending, you'll have the heel of your shoe stuck under the nosing at every step and you'll just fall... Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'intrate. Yes, I did digress.

Four times out of five, it is the obvious... I must have used the wrong unit hundreds of times at the Lab, but never missed it when troubleshooting someone else's procedure. Curiously enough, the DXF "standard" has (I've been told) always (?) had the option to embed unit information, but few programs - most notably AutoCAD - do it. Speaking of curiosity: I wonder how AutoCAD users handle this.

Meters and millimeters?

Actually, Gerard, your excellent treatise perhaps explains why my attempt to create a "Reset World Coordinates" command failed - and even some pointers on how to make it work.

Can I have MiniCAD 7 for Leopard, please! I have some old files to access & convert. I don't think any later version can open MC 3 format.

I can't see any problems, unless you create those. I've worked in various mapping grids, including several AMG-zones, and it's been hunky dory since VW 9. Even my MapInfo MID/MID Export & Import filters have produced fine, reproducible results that sustain many back-and-forth movement iterations. Shape -files and georeferenced aerials (except GeoTIFFs) also work just fine. However, my testing has been somewhat limited so far.

If you include a simple a VectorScript to the action, you may at least get the import dialog. VW is not particularly AppleScriptable, but it knows one word of AppleScript: Do Script. A Folder Action? Maybe. I run a lot of my generic utilites from FileMaker Pro with this overall approach. However, one has never been able to "Open" a DWG-file with VW.

If I work in real world (mapping) coordinates, I don't want the origin ever to be at the page centre. At creation of a file, eg. when importing a site survey, the origin should be set - and that's it. End of story. Objects should be placed in independently of any "page" (which is partly obsolete because of viewports - although at least I print from design layers, too) and page moved, if requested. After that, one should be able to define only a User Coordinate System (I'm not necessarily referring to the UCS of AutoCAD), with an origin anywhere, maybe even with any rotation both in 2D and 3D. The 3D-user origin should also be able to be defined. It would be so much easier to define that this point is now 36 metres above the project or task datum than that its RL is 129.245 which makes, let me see, 36 metres from such and such. (Maybe the term should be datum?) Object Info & the silly Heads Up Display probably should show User Coordinates; in programming mode World Coordinates would be fine as long as displaying locations could be toggled to User Coordinates, which should be able to be made to match World Coordinates with a simple command. --- Somewhat half-baked, I'm afraid, but hopefully conveys the general idea.

Referencing, too. When did we get it - 1999 or 2000? Anyway, I'm sure that at least most "traditionally drafting conventions" need to be abandoned when starting to use VW. In fact I think that's the fundamental reason & idea... It'd be interesting to know what is "that feature" no-one is using.

Busy days ahead for some members of this forum: full-time raving and ranting about dozens of programs...

Chris - that is one of the many ways how one can ruin the coordinate system. Rotating the grid (ie. coordinate system) is another one. Using rulers and dragging the origin to a "convenient" location yet another one. All these methods should only affect the UCS - but, alas, we don't have one! "Set Origin to Drawing Center" (ie. Set Origin) should be removed from all workspaces. Rulers should be turned off and VW Preferences also removed from workspaces.

I can't help in your problem, but I just have to compliment your wisdom in not giving everyone a DVD-drive. (When I was a Network Nazi, I used to disable even disquette drives...) In a Mac-environment, you could just open a "Disk Image" across the network. I take you don't have those in the Dark Side?

The default position is, AFAIK, not the original world coordinate position. The behaviour described by DWorks should be immediately disabled!