BobWeaver

Thanks for the reply. It only did it when running from the admin account. Worked fine from a user account. So, hardware problems were unlikely. In the end, I fixed it by trashing the prefs file.

This just started happening a few days ago. The drawing window randomly refreshes even when I'm not doing anything. It causes a serious flicker which is very hard on the eyes. It seems to do a couple of quick refreshes and then a slower one. After the problem started, I upgraded from 11.5 to 11.5.1 and it still does it. There are no other applications running when it does this. I'm running on a Mac powerbook G4, OSX 10.3 Panther. I can't think of any changes that I've made to the system software that would have caused this. Any idea what I should check?

Follow-up: I had earlier tried setting all the Vectorworks files to full access for everyone in the finder's Get Info window, but it didn't work. Finally, I re-installed Vectorworks, and then set its folder and all enclosed files to full access for everyone. Now it works on all OS accounts.

I created a second OSX user account that I use when at a client's office and has access only to the client's files, so that if anyone snoops through my files while I'm away from my desk, they won't see any private files. However, I've noticed that when I'm logged in under this account, not all VW functions work properly. Specifically, the DXF import always fails. If I log out and then log in with my admin password, then VW imports the files just fine. I assume that there is probably something wrong with the file permissions in some of the VW application files, but I have no idea what to check. Any ideas? (I'm using version 11.5.0 despite the info below.) [ 09-08-2005, 01:15 AM: Message edited by: BobWeaver ]

I'm using a Logitech mouse on a Mac. I have the latest driver for it, but it doesn't allow me to customize it for separately for each application. There's just one overall setting.

Since the replies to my thread in the general discussion section showed that this is a common complaint, I thought I should bring this up here. Using the mouse scroll wheel to pan or zoom causes the drawing to go flying across the screen way too fast. If I use the mouse control panel to set scroll speed to the very minimum, it is just barely acceptable in Vectorworks, but then becomes unusable in other applications because it barely moves at all. It would be nice to have the option in the Vectorworks application prefs to set the scroll/zoom speed. My only current workaround is to go into the system control panel before my VW session to set the speed to minimum, and then after I'm finished with VW, go back and set the speed back to normal. This is a real pain in the you-know-what. Platform: Macintosh OSX 10.3, Vectorworks 11.0.0

After reading up on the Logitech website, it appears that the speed of scrolling is dependent on how the application interprets the scroll wheel signal. In other words the application decides how much it's goind to move the window per increment of the wheel. So, it doesn't appear to be a driver problem since my other applications work smoothly with this mouse. I think I'll post something in the wish list forum about this, since it appears to be a common complaint.

Actually, Vectorworks is one of the few things that has worked well since my upgrade to 10.3.7. However because of other software problems, specifically applications which access the network (Safari, OmniWeb, Mail), I ended up removing 10.3.7.

Hi Eric, Yes scroll wheel zooming is available in version 11. If you hold down the option key (probably alt or ctrl if you use windows) then the scrolling changes to zooming. Nice feature if it could be geared down a bit. I wonder if it's related to this particular Logitech mouse.

Since updating to VW 11 and to Mac OSX 10.3, I find that the mouse wheel moves things way too fast. The scrolling was very smooth in VW 8.5 on OS9, but now it's virtually unusable. I'm using a Logitech Optical Mouse on my Mac Powerbook G4, 400 MHz. I installed the latest mouse driver from Logitech, with no improvement. I set the scroll speed in the Logitech control panel as low as it will go. The result is that scrolling in VW is still way too fast. One increment of the scroll wheel moves the drawing over a half page. When zooming, one increment of the wheel doubles or halves the scale. Meanwhile in other applications, with these same control panel settings, the scroll wheel barely moves anything anymore. VW 8 used to work so nicely with the wheel mouse. Why is VW 11's scroll wheel behaviour so radically different from other applications?

There are, of course, a lot of workarounds for things, but I think it's unfortunate that we have to resort to these rather than just having a clean dxf export function. I guess part of the problem is how you perceive the cad file, as a model, or as a drawing. I look at it as drawing and, as such, I expect everything that I see on the drawing should export. I suppose if you treat it as a model with multiple possible views, then it make the export situation more difficult.

Kenneth: I wasn't aware of DXF manager. I will check it out. Thanks. I have been trying to avoid purchasing Autocad simply for the purpose of converting drawings, but I know a few contract draftsmen that I could get to do the final cleanup. Regarding my comment above about exporting a totally exploded drawing using the HPGL to DXF converter, it doesn't seem to be a problem with my clients so far. They seem to be satisfied that everything is on the drawing, and that they can edit it if necessary. At the stage of the project where they get the drawings, they are generally just archived and rarely looked at again. I should also mention that most of my drawings are electrical schematics or wiring diagrams, so layers and grouping are not as important. Importing is not as much of an issue for me because I usually receive general arrangement drawings from clients, and then spend a lot of time turning off layers or otherwise deleting things. So, the stuff that VW doesn't import usually isn't missed. My biggest problem seems to be title blocks which are usually in paper space and import as a postage stamp. But, I can rescale these myself.

Thanks for the worksheet tip. That has really been one of the biggest export problems that I have had to deal with. Politics enters into all of this. When my clients send me a drawing, they don't want to mess around doing things like converting paper space to model space, adjusting extents, exploding blocks, etc. If I tell them they have to do this, they tell me that I should be using a better CAD system that can read their files as is. When I send them a drawing file that should be readable by their system, I better make darn sure that it looks like the original drawing. I have one client who actually specifies that final drawings delivered to them be "Autocad files" not "Autocad compatible files." In other words, the drawings have to have been at least opened and then saved in Autocad to ensure that all of the data is intact. I can't really blame them.

I really don't want to start ranting, but I'm sure that everyone in this industry has clients that demand AutoCad compatible files that can be turned over to them once their project is complete. I am in that situation right now. The trouble is that the VectorWorks dxf export feature doesn't bother to export things that don't have a dxf counterpart. That is not good enough! It should convert objects into things that CAN be represented in dxf even if it means dumbing down. For example, worksheets should be converted to tables of text. I don't really care if my client has access to the original worksheet as long as he can get a visual representation of it into his AutoCad program, edit it, and it displays and plots. It's better than nothing. Even in the worst possible situation, any VectorWorks object should be convertible into a bunch of tiny little line segments. So, in my current situation, I have resorted to using MicroSpot's MacPlot to plot to HPGL files and then use an HPGL-to-DXF converter to create the dxf file. It produces files that import into AutoCad exactly they way they appeared in VectorWorks. Of course, the downside is that the files are totally exploded tiny little line segments. And as for dxf importing, I'll leave that rant for another time. [This message has been edited by BobWeaver (edited 01-30-2001).]