Petri

I have no experience with Jon's online user group, but whatever he has written here and elsewhere is remarkably sensible and clear.

This is correct. Now, should you want an intelligent object that can transform itself (ie assign its components to other classes or do something similar you need a parametric object. Perfectly doable. They are not parametric objects. The McMansion objects supplied with the program do not have capabilities you seem to require. Do multi-layered AutoCAD blocks inherit the properties of the layer they are placed on? (I know very little about AutoCAD.)

Of course one could have a parametric object for something like this. Very, very efficient!

I think it is exactly the case. But maybe I don't quite understand.

This may soon become an interesting (in the Chinese sense of the word) problem to some old users! They won't necessarily have a machine capable of running MiniCAD 7!

Islandmon, This seems to become handy again. Now I obviously need to convert RGB to CMYK in bulk! At least after NNA sorts out the CMYK-oddities on the new colour palettes. Thanks once more!

Yes, you should - in VectorWorks.

Right. How is that embedded in a text file? Well, who cares. At the moment I'm more interested in the meaning of the numbers.

That's just what I created for testing... The three top left Apple Crayons as VW colours! The colour files provided are not copy-protected in any way. I have write-permissions to the folder. Anyway, the numbers are baffling: In the XML file "Clover" is 0.50196,0.00000,0.50196,0.49804 (and the "hint" tells that those are CMYK values althoug only shows three decimals.) In CMYK sliders it is 71%, 5%, 99%, 17% I fail to see any correlation between the two value sets. Why is the magic number 0.50196 both 71% and 99%?

It is quite unfortunate that one cannot use the unit settings of the file in a report. Eg instead of =AREA we might be able to say =AREAINFILEUNITS or have a cell formatting. People working in millimetres and wanting areas in square metres have to divide by 10?6 - and try telling that to an artistic interior designer!

Hard coded? The standard files look exactly the same as my Crayons-palette in which I can edit the colours. Anyway, what do the numbers mean?

So, we can now have named colours - excellent! I can't find a way of naming (or renaming) them without establishing a new palette. Nothing in documentation. VectorScript obviously can't be used to create colours? Do I have to learn XML... 0.00000,0.50196,0.50196,0.49804Cayenne 0.00000,0.00000,0.50196,0.49804Asparagus 0.50196,0.00000,0.50196,0.49804Clover But what are the numbers? What is so magic with 0.50196 that all my crayons seem to have that?

Both VS and record formats ignore the System level decimal separator definition. The decimal separator is mathematically a radix point. [snip] The choice of symbol for the decimal separator affects the choice of symbol for the thousands separator. Consequently the latter is treated in this article as well.Countries where a comma is used to mark the radix point include: Albania, Andorra, Argentina, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belgium, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Canada (French-speaking), Costa Rica, Croatia, Cuba, Chile, Colombia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Estonia, Faroes, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Greenland, Guatemala, Honduras, Hungary, Indonesia, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg (uses both separators officially), Macedonia, Moldova, Netherlands, Norway, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, South Africa (officially, but dot point is commonly used in business and science), Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, Uruguay, Venezuela, Vietnam. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator) Plenty of unhappy people, including a user of mine... Surely this is easy to fix?

Me neither.

A keyboard shortcut? I've eg. had "Command +" and "Command -" for adding & clipping surfaces for years. Workspace Editor again!

Assuming your length unit is an inch. Since vhector is from Rotterdam, his length unit is probably a centimeter and he may want to use metres in this case.

Ditto. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ditto_machine

Stable here. No flickering. MacOS X. When did you last get decent computers, MJW? Ladas may flicker.

Fair enough. In 2 to 4 years, only trowel-and-hammer contractors do not have computers. Meanwhile, the onus of printing sets of drawings will be transferred - quite justly, if I may say - to the Contractor. Any Contractor worth his salt will have the software and hardware to deal with digital data in colour. (I exclude the U.S. of A. and North Korea from this prediction.)

Actually, the practical maths is quite complex. In the 20 years today since Sgt. Rich taught us to CAD, we have only seen a poor substitute. Your Worship: I humbly submit, if I may, that the requirement to represent, redundantly, as the many eminently qualified witnesses for Defence have more than amply and adequately demonstrated, I believe to the Court's full satisfaction, the requirement to explicitly and in full accordance of the current, albeit in many ways outdated and therefore perhaps not quite relevant - as several witnesses have testified on the basis of a large number of successful projects without any contractual problems that might have come to the attention of Her Majesty or her most respected Judicial System, so accurately described as Justice, Your Worship - standards, any and all insulation in the so-called drawings, be they plans, sections or details, whilst the written, hence surely, notwihstanding the particular details of the Contract, less ambiguous and therefore having the primacy when considering the respective status of the documents of the Contract in question; the existence and extent my client does no contest while strongly contesting the Plaintiff's interpretation of certain, but hereby not necessarily acknowledged, Letters of Exchange & Correspondence, which may or may not include telephone conversations, some of which may or may not have been carried out using, in one end or the other, one of these so-called mobile phones, and testimonials presented to the pleasure of this Court of Justice and to be perused by my most learned colleague, acting in an admirable way for the respected Plaintiff, whose integrity as such is beyond questioning or doubt, but who, on this occasion, seems to have received poor advise.

Not quite. While Toyota owns the Lexus brand, Rich Diehl can't expect to have all the niceties of a Lexus in his vehicle of choice.

I'm sure you do. It's not just a UK thing. The conventions in question are in fact quite recent. Blueprint-dyeline -era stuff, for the time being still upheld by the outdated technology of photocopies. Before blueprints etc., architects prepared drawing sets by hand, in colour. Red for brick, grey for stone, sand for timber etc. Absolutely beewdiful! As we are moving from drawings to models and have a realistic possibility of better communication in colour (hard-copies & electronic), I can't see the point of improving VW's capabilities of implementing soon-to-be-obsolete draughting conventions. Just take your protein pills and put your helmet on. There's nothing you can do, Major Chris! EDIT But of course there are plenty of draughting programs available. Like AutoCAD.

You don't have colour copiers in the UK? You can't afford a 2000 ? colour printer and the whole nine yards of paper? Excuses, excuses... C'mon! If anything, the move to colour gives your firm more control. Imagine this: no more obsolete, superseded drawings in circulation or when there are, you can immediately recognize them. (Well, almost. There can still be prints of the previous issue, but at least not photocopies.) All Contract Documents, including revisions, are supplied by the Architect either as prints or as protected PDF-files. Photocopies, facsimiles or other reprodutions of the Architect's drawings are not considered as valid documents in case of a dispute.

You don't. 3D-polygons with more than 3 vertices are not necessarily planar and therefore are "non-determined". The intersection "line" of two generic 3D-polygons is, I think, almost impossible to determine unambiguously (if at all - how do you define the path of points at the intersection of two non-determined surfaces!) By and large, avoid 3D polygons altogether. Having said that, I use them quite a lot in my parametric objects, where I can be certain that they are planar. EDIT Not one my finest moments. I know what this is about. I am essentially a mathematically-oriented person. I just don't know enough to communicate the concept, because mathematics never interested me.

Well, well, well.. My experience (reported earlier here) is exactly the same. OK. This is what I did: bought an inexpensive (in the scale of things) roll-feed large-format printer (A1-width) and boxes of cheap bond paper. All tendering sets & all site sets were printed in colour. Everyone was happy! (Especially the bloke who supplied ink cartridges.) The cost? Well, in proportion & in the overall scheme of things: nothing. I saved tens of hours of tedious work in every job and tens of hours of time spent on the phone trying to explain things to chippies and painters.