Richard T

I can do that too with Microstation. Trouble is, it only works if your hatches are made with lines - if they have curves, arcs etc then you're in trouble.

How do I make my changes to the width of columns in the Navigation Palette stick between sessions? It's getting to be frustrating to have to adjust it again each time I start VW.

that doesn't work for me

I just created a new plant, turned on Rendering at Creation, but forgot to change the shadow offset from 0. So after I had created it, and placed a new plant in the drawing, I went to edit its definition and set the offset to a suitable value. However when I exited out, something happened to the display of the plant, as you can see from the attached screen capture. It appears as though the 2d graphics are being displayed offset from where they should be, as can be seen from the second screen capture where I have two plant objects selected. What's going on? I have attached the file if that helps with analysis.

I can't believe it either. Not just the things Chris has mentioned, but hatches should be able to be applied with a Scale setting as well. And just lines? C'mon! Hatching needs to include patterns as well. Don't tell me about the tiling tool, it's horrible. We need the results of tiling, but achieved by using the Hatch tool so boundaries can be modified without having to re-tile. And the hatching definition tool needs a complete overhaul. We really should be able to graphically define the components of a hatch, and specify an origin point, rather than having to clunk around with hit and miss. Finally, we shouldn't need to have separate definitions for simple single line hatches and cross hatches, spacing and angle of the lines should be able to be defined on the fly. My 2c.

You can do this in AutoCAD, Sketchup, Microstation and more than likely a multitude of other CAD packages. VW seems to be rather lacking to me in its Hatch capabilities.

Patrick, Having done some programming myself, I know it would not be an easy thing to make a radio button double-clickable, it's just not in the nature of radio buttons to be used this way. It would have to be a completely different type of object. In fact I can't think of any other software at all where a radio button can be double clicked. I like your ideas for other double clicking though.

Hmm strange, it worked this time. That's the exact string I put in before when it went blank - but that time it was getting towards the end of the day and VW was behaving a bit erratically anyway. But thanks!

Currently I have a custom Plant Tag as follows: ID&"-"&Quantity Is there any way I can get just a space between the ID and Quantity instead of the hyphen? I tried putting a space between the quotes but I ended up with a blank tag. Thanks

DWG export from Microstation is generally better we find, the files retain more "intelligence". However, it might be a good idea to get a pdf copy of what the files are supposed to look like too. You could go to the Bentley website http://www.bentley.com/en-US/Products/Bentley+View/ and download the free Bentley View application which lets you view and print DGN files.

Thanks bonus, I can use that technique to get round a specific case. However, greatly expanded text manipulation capabilities really need to be added to VW in my opinion.

Edit the titleblock symbol, and move the location of the 2D locus that the Northpoint uses for its location, and the :Stamp text. I would have thought you would have received an Ozcad CD of training videos lately, that has a number of movies explaining the whole titleblock stuff really well. If not, get in touch with Julian to see if you can get it.

Are you talking about the VAA titleblocks delivered with the Australian version of VW 2008?

Can anyone tell me if it's possible to change the width of a selected piece of text, or is this simple (and much needed) task still an impossibility?

One way of solving this would be to have a Description attribute for Classes/Layers etc, then users could create descriptions and sort on them to their hearts' content

Being able to set display order by class in the way that Microstation has done would be very handy.

We're still to kick off a live project using VW, but intend to use auto-classing extensively.

If the text is 10mm high and the shoulder length is set to 10mm, then the shoulder length should be the same as the height of the text, you'd think ...

For us poor people out there who can't capture direct to pdf, well now you can if you wish. It's called FastStone Capture, it's free, and it integrates with Windows just about as nicely as you could wish. Aside from the regular copy to clipboard, it allows you to capture the screen direct to a file, including PNG and PDF formats.

Thanks for the info guys, makes me feel a bit more confident now!

I have seen some fantastic 3D PDF work created using Microstation, allowing you to follow a preset "flythrough" animated path, or move through a model on your own independent path, rotate, zoom etc, along with changing rendering, turning on/off layers etc. Of course, that doesn't help the original question

Why do you want to rotate the co-ordinate system? I may be missing something here because I haven't tried rotating the view in VW yet. In Microstation, you simply rotate the view and all your coordinates remain as real-world.

I'm definitely interested in knowing the answer to this too, as we frequently work with surveyors and engineer's data that is located on the AMG.

Would someone please advise if I am doing something wrong, or is this a bug? In my Callout Tool preferences, I have the shoulder length set to say 10mm, and this length shows up when I am clicking the two points for each end of the leader, but after I enter my callout text, there is no shoulder line. It doesn't matter if I'm doing Shoulder-to-Arrow or Arrow-to-Shoulder, the shoulder just will not appear. And adjusting the shoulder length in the OIP simply makes a marginal adjustment to the space between the leader line and text.

Thanks Andrew, look at working plane was just what I needed. Although you wouldn't think it would be too difficult to add a function to rotate a view by 3 points!