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Keith Hadland

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Everything posted by Keith Hadland

  1. I think there may be some crossing of nomenclature here - by 'plant database' i mean the plant reference data whereas 'plant definitions' are the actual defined plants with spread, height, symbols etc. I'd think anyone using the place plant tool would have to define and save their plant definitions, but struggle to think or reasons to go near the database itself - it's difficult to search and is a poor substitute for a decent reference book, and doesn't even save that much work when defining a plant.
  2. Miles, seems that you're currently defining a separate symbol for each plant anyway and then counting those in a worksheet. To use the place plant tool you'd need to define the symbol, define a plant to use the symbol, then actually place the plant. Of course if you've already got the symbols you could jigger things so they could be used by plants and then only need to define each plant one time - a bit of effort but maybe worth looking at in one of those 'quiet times' that we long for when we're busy and hate when they arrive! You'd have to check what happens to your class assignments in the symbols too once they go through the place plant machine - not something i've worried about thus far, but it may affect your workflow.
  3. I'm also a garden designer & think the plant database is one of the biggest red herrings in Landmark. It's talked up as a useable feature whereas in truth it's not really anything more than an electronic reference book, and a bad one at that as it doesn't contain many relevant plants for the typical domestic garden. I did spend some time converting one of the major nursery catalogues into the correct format for importing to the database, but even then found I didn't use the database as it was as quick to define a new plant from scratch so haven't bothered with that since v10.5. I do use & teach the place plant tool though - I'd venture to say that most VW users aren't tek-savvy enough to start writing their own plant utilities, some would even struggle with adding 3rd party scripts, and so most people have to live with what they've got. The work flow of planting has improved massively in VW12 but the fragility of the file structure still makes life difficult - and as for the default plant symbols, they generally fall uncomfortably between being too bad to use for presentation drawings and too fancy to use on working drawings. I usually advise people to define a new set of symbols, get rid of the default plant definitions and ignore the plant database!
  4. I've noticed that too - older Adobe products can't read files exported from 12.5.1, whereas stuff printed using PrimoPDF or PDF995 work just fine. The latest Acrobat (v7 i think) handles VW exported PDFs fine so it's probably a version issue - maybe your printer needs to get an update! Cheers Keith
  5. Another nice-to-have on plant tags would be an Automatic tag alignment (as for the Callout tool), so the tag text aligns correctly to the left or right depending on the position of the label relative to the plants, rather than having to define this for each plant and then manually change it when setting out a planting plan.
  6. I've tried a variety of mice (mouses?) & trackballs and have finally settled on a Wacom Intuos 3 tablet - the Intuos 3 is probably overkill for VW as you don't need the tilt/pressure sensitivity of the pen, but the function keys & touch strip are a bonus for quick access to some functions (and there are plenty on eBay). I'm also a garden designer so probably use VW in a similar capacity to yourself - you can probably get away with an A5 pad for most work unless you're tracing a lot of outlines at 1:1, I've got A4 but tend to spend a lot of time with the pad set to a reduced area, and I've helped people who had A3 which are a bit on the large side unless you've got desk space to burn. Keith
  7. I've got some curious behaviour when trying to switch between multiple drawing files using the 'Window' menu command. The Tile/Cascade/etc. options work fine but when I select one of the files from the bottom of the list nothing happens. I'd hoped that upgrading to 12.5.1 would resolve this but it's still broken - any suggestions? (Have also reinstalled for another reason but that didn't fix it either).
  8. Apologies if this has been notified elsewhwere - had a quick search but found nothing. It seems that the good people at Google have tweaked their file format for SkUp 6, with the result that the importer (from VW 12.5.1) no longer works. Obvious quick workaround is to save as SkUp 5 and then import, but that's going to become a bit of a faff in the longer term. Also a 'nice to have' would be a direct import of the textures from SkUp into VW so the 3D model can be recreated simply. Cheers Keith
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