Pat Stanford

Jeff, can you try and edit the criteria of the report and see if the check box for Object in Viewport Annotations is checked? If so, do the objects get counted properly?

No option for straight lines that I know of. Probably a good thing to put in the Wish List forum.

I am glad you got it working for you. I just tried use Document Units in a drawing set to Square Meters and it worked fine, except that I could not find a way (after about 5 minutes of playing) to control the number of decimal places after the division. In the following formula, the top row is in document units and give just l/s as the written units. The next two lines are for Document Units and Sq M that I was trying to see how each option actually displayed the units. They are all the same. I don't know what was going on if your version. Flow is: #AREA#/50sq m l/s #AREA# #AREA##sq m_1_1#

The next time you get this take a screen shot of the dialog box that comes up. We might be better able to explain the options there to solve your problem.

I use 15 operations and keep the latest 12 versions. That seems to get me a autosave every 2 to 8 minutes depending on what I am doing. With an average of 5 minutes that means I have about an hour of intermediate backups. I guess I should remember to do real saves at least once per hour. Buy using Operations instead of Time, you know that the autosave will start between other operations and not in the middle of something.

Since most of the objects seem to have a flat plane, I would use the Set Working Plane tool and then the Look At Working Plane to get a single ("front" elevation). If you only need the objects and not everything around them, I would consider making them symbols and placing an extra copy on a differently layer where they layout orthogonal. Another option is to use the Rotated Plan view to set the Plan view to be orthogonal. You can then switch to a Front/Side/Back view using this rotated view as the basis. If you don't get a warning dialog box (always/never do this) option, then go to Vectorworks Prefererences, Session Tab and click the Reset Saved Settings button at the top right. You will have to reset all of the saved settings and redo them again, but often that is good as you may have told a dialog to never show again and then forgotten there was a different option. Ask again if you need more help.

Obviously your choice and decision, but if you budget about 1£/hour for 2000 work hours a year, you can buy VW Architect and a new mid-range iMac every two years. And then you wouldn't have to worry about what you are going to do if you old hardware dies and you have to replace both hardware and software at the same time. To me it is a business tool. If you billing rate is 50£/hour, then you are looking at paying 2% of your rate for your basic tools. If something newer can make you 2% more efficient, then you are break even. I think you would be very surprised at how much has changed between 2016 and 2021 and how much more productive you could be by upgrading more often. Data Tags, Data Visualization, Grid Bubble tool, Improved Title Block Border. Those are just a few things off the top of my head that have come in since 2016 that will directly help with 2D productivity. I am not trying to be argumentative, just want to point out a different way to look at costs. I hope whatever you choose works out well for you.

Yes, VW2017 is compatible with High Sierra, but it is the last version compatible with High Sierra. What are you trying to do? You are asking about 5 and 6 year old versions of VW and the Operating System. You can certainly operate that way and always run 5 years behind. Or you can consider upgrading to the current version that will then probably be stable for the next 5 years or so.

The VW autosave files should not be part of your backup and archive policy. They are great for as you say "spur of the moment" crash recovery or "Oh , why did I do that" times, but thy are next to useless two weeks later when you are trying to find the one from "Before I moved the window, but after we rotated the kitchen." Daily backups are good (in my opinion a must have), but random autosaves more than a day or two old are worthless. Archive: Daily (when worked on) or at a minimum at major points in the design (preliminary submittal, customer approval, submitted for plan check, etc.) Backup: Continuous (Something like TimeMachine), "Bootable" Close of HD (If you store your data on a disk that is not used for booting a computer then just a clone is ok). Daily incremental backups. Nothing is backed up until you have at least three separate copies, on at least two different media types, in at least two different physical locations. Syncing services like Dropbox, iCloud, Google Drive, etc. DO NOT count as backups. They sync so fast that if you delete something from your local copy it is likely to be gone from everywhere before you notice. Web based storage services like Amazon S3 and Wasabi, that you control the sync to, especially if you use a program that does incremental backups and keeps the historical copies do count as backups

VW2016 is listed as not compatible with High Sierra.

You might be able to contact VW Tech Support directly and they might be able to help you.

Take a look at this thread. Similar question. So far we have not come up with a solution for the A or B data tag.

Can you send me a simple file based on your template that shows the three types of objects and the the three Tag styles?

I don't understand enough about IFC to know if creating/using a single pset across different types of objects is a good idea or not. If it is acceptable to you then that would be the easiest solution as you could then use a stock Data Tag to access the information across different types of objects. I also don't know how you would get this "custom set" to automatically be attached to these object types when you create them. If you have to go to the data pane of the OIP and manually attach the set to every object (this is probably scriptable) then that may be worse than using different Data Tags. It is relatively simple to report the data from different IFC psets in a single column in a worksheet. Especially if it is only a few different psets a couple of nested IF functions or possibly even just a Concat could return the data from the correct pset as long as you didn't have multiple "reported" psets attached to a single object. For attaching different Data Tags to different object types, I think a relatively simple script that defines a Data Tag Style to an Object Type could be used. You probably will not get the automatic preview you get with the current Data Tag tool, but I have not played with that part so far. You would still need to define the Data Tag Style to show the information you are interested in. You would then pick an object and if the picked Object Type matched the Object Type list in the script it would place a Data Tag of the matching Style and associate the Data Tag with the picked object. What do you think?

Do you really need a single type of data tag for all these object types, or would a tool that would automatically select the correct Data Tag Style for the object type you are hovering over be sufficient? If it does need to be a single Data Tag Style, would you be willing to run a script to update the data rather than have it automatically update?

I understand the concept of doors having handedness, but I don't know the industry standard for that definition. Can someone please explain the concept of handedness of doors as used in architecture and how you would like to display/use it?

What was that Bruce Willis movie? Unbreakable? He could not be hurt and Mr. Glass would break ribs by sneezing? Yin and Yang. I will try to send you good thoughts.

I think I figured it out with a lot of help from other posts on the forum. The math in Data Tags takes the units into account. So to get rid of unit marks you have to divide by something else using the same unit mark. You can then put your now unit mark text in. The following data tag definition displays the Area of a drawing in Square Feet but with a unit mark of L/S. Note that there is no space between the1 and the sq in the divisor of 1sq ft. #AREA#/1sq ft L/S Your definition probably needs to be something like: #AREA#/50sq m l/s Good luck.

Did you get this sorted? Or do you still need more explanation?

I am seeing mostly the same thing, but for me it only depends on the Pen Style. The Pen Color can stay as By Class. I have a feeling this is by design, but I can't figure out what would make this a good design.

I hope I am wrong, but I don't think you can. It appears that only linear dimension can be set to not "Show Mark" by unchecking the box. That kind of makes sense so you always know if something is not a simple dimension, but it makes it really hard to do what you are trying to do. I will ponder this and maybe we will both get lucky and someone else will chime in with the easy answer. Sorry.

Did a restart solve you problem? Or are you still stuck?

Quick off the top of my head response. Zero testing done, so I may be way off base. Plants are PlugIn Objects. Plant Objects contain symbols. Those Symbols may contain other symbols. So if you set you criteria to be Plants, you should get the right count. If you set the criteria to be Plants or Symbols you should get a double count. If you set the criteria to be Symbols and the check the Include objects in PIOs, you "should" get the right count. If you set the criteria to be Symbols and you check both the Include Objects in Symbols and the Include Objects in PIOs buttons you should get at least a double count. HTH

There is no automatic way to do what you want, but you can do it marionettily (I know that is not a word, but you know what I mean.) You will have to create text objects in marionette on the drawing and also store that data into a record.field combination. If you want to be able to have the user enter data in the OIP, you will have to read the data from the record.field combination and then use that data to do the calculations in the marionette object and then store back the results (if you have changed anything) at the end of the marionette network. Take a look that these nested threads for more information. Ask again if you still need more help.

You are very welcome. Ask again when you get stuck.