RAM

I use both VW12 and SW almost daily. VW can't come close to SW for solid modeling however SW 2D capabilities are relatively unsophisticated compared to VW. I have created a routine for myself that exploits the strengths of both. At least I think so.

Accept that it is VERY CLOSE! The problem is that it really isn't very close. There needs to be a way of manually setting screen scale. Then you could increase/decrease in whatever increment necessary to suit what you're doing.

I currently use a program called "Cute PDF" with much better success than with the current Adobe. I believe I was also using it back to the days of VW 10.

I have recently "upgraded" to V12. One of the first things I noticed to be different is all the little red boxes V12 places in various locations. I can find no explanation for what they are trying to tell me and frankly find them to be a PITA. Anybody know how to turn them off?

Items selected using the cursor or marque should be made immediately visible by some form of highlighting, preferably color. This is how other CAD systems do it and it's beyond reason that Vectorworks doesn't do something. As it is, I have to delete/restore my selected items to make sure of what I have selected. It's amazing that a professional CAD system could exist this long without such a necessary feature. Making the handles visible isn't close to being adequate.

Better yet, how about an "E-MAIL" command that allows you to send a document without closing it and opening your mail program?

I'd like to see a "HIDE" tool. I would make it work by adding the command "hide" to a right click menu that appears when something is selected. I'd also like to see selected items change color or something so I know what is selected.

We switched from Macs to PCs when the Windows version of Vectorworks first became available. In fact we were a beta site. We've never been sorry we switched. Macs would be fine if you could buy any software for them. As it is, I don't see the point.

Bruce, no we don't have many names that long or I probably would have noticed it before now. i don't consider that relevant to this issue though, since the VW programmers must know that sooner or later SOMEBODY will need a 32nd character and it's their responsibility to let that person know about the limitation. They certainly don't list this sort of thing in their advertising when they announce a new version so how are we to learn of it except to stumble upon it. BTW, I forwarded a copy of my original post in this thread to the moderator of the board and I must say that his lack of response/participation speaks volumes to their attitude. We've been using their software for many years and in fact were a beta site for the first Windows version. I've reported many bugs and requested many improvements and can say that I don't remember any of them actually being addressed in a timely manner. They are certainly not bashful about asking us to pay for upgrades though. I have told them point blank that I would not upgrade again until the bugs I reported years ago got fixed. I realize that all software has it's good & bad attributes but over the years Vectorworks support system has been very callous, IMHO.

The last I remember was when we were told file names could be 255 characters. That was many years ago and in my mind never changed. It's beyond comprehension that a programmer would allow this to happen and to compound it they don't even open a dialog box to tell you it's happening. BTW, we are running WinXP Pro machines rather than Macs. I'm even more surprised this happens on Macs.

We've been using Minicad/Vectorworks for more than the 11 years I've been here and so we have lots of old drawings made with previous revisions of Vectorworks. We've had many problems opening old drawings with V11. It seems to me that the only reason you did this is to obsolete your old software. I don't agree with this policy however I don't dispute your right to do so. My problem is with the code that creates a "new name" for an older drawing opened with V11. For some reason some of the characters at the end of the name were omitted. I just noticed this today so I have no idea how long it's been doing this. You either did this intentionally or not. If it's unintentional then consider this a bug report. If it's intentional then please consider this the harshest possible criticism of this practice. I hope and will assume this is a bug because I don't like thinking anybody there would intentionally be this stupid. Please let me know how this pans out. Thanks. [ 07-27-2005, 04:46 PM: Message edited by: RAM ]

I just used PDF995 and it did produce usable results although not perfect. It still has issues with text the same as the others. This program displaces text slightly from where it is on the original but at least it is intelligible. Thanks for the tip. Maybe a little tweaking is in order.

Over the years I've had many conflicts between Adobe PDF writer and various versions of Vectorworks. Today I tried to create a PDF to e-mail to a vendor and each of the text characters on one of the layers rotated 90? CCW. The other layer, which had lots of text, was perfect. I also use another PDF creator called "Cute PDF" which sometimes works better. It did work a little better today but still had problems with text. Are there any answers for this or am I the only one?

You can save many preferences by making templates. If you or your company use formats as I do you can store the formats as *.sta (used to be called stationery). We even have many sizes of formats all with our preferred environmentals stored. There are still some system environmentals not stored like which pallets are open or which tools visible within those templates but it's a start.

The freehand tool needs to be able to snap to objects and points just like any other line tool. The literature used to say it did snap but it has never snapped even back to MiniCad.