Donald Wardlaw

<<The door itself should go into the class called Doors. The sills class has to be on because the swing is put in that class. The swing is put in a separate class so reflected ceiling plans are quickly created by setting the sills class to be invisible and the ceiling class to be visible. >> Katie, Problem I have with this is that the door frame shows in ceiling plan view. I'm trying to get the door to completely disapper in the ceiling plan and not succeeding. Regards, Donald

I'm sorry, rereading my post the following, <<Sometimes when you have more than one document open and you put one in the dock, and you then bring it up from the dock, the drop down layer menu does not show the menu for the file you brought up, it shows the layer menu for the file you put away. >> should read, Sometimes when you have more than one document open and you put one in the dock, and you then bring it up from the dock, the drop down layer menu does not show the menu for the file you brought up, it shows the layer menu for ***the file you alread had up.***

Hi Mark, Thanks for the update. I'm not sure I know what you mean by "minimize." You mean hitting the green button at the top of the window? Or do you mean putting it in the dock? If you mean putting the document in the dock, I have a couple observations. First, the condition you describe about the mode bars is not the only anomaly that occurs when you put things in the dock. Sometimes when you have more than one document open and you put one in the dock, and you then bring it up from the dock, the drop down layer menu does not show the menu for the file you brought up, it shows the layer menu for the file you put away. At least that is approximately my recollection. Also, the issue has been around a long time. I saw it in v.10. Second, the working hypothesis suggests that the corruption only occurs when a user a user does a save. I have lost 3 files and I don't believe in any case it occured while I was saving the file. I have crashed while saving but I did not lose the file, to the best of my recollection. <<THIS is when the problem happens>> or, it happens here. May happen other places too. Regards, Donald

Hello again Mark, <<Still trying to catch up here - When you say "I found I needed one nearby because when the problem arises I can't save to local drive." does that mean that there are times when you can't save VectorWorks files to a local hard drive? If so, are you determining that be the fact because your explicit saves or autosaves are actively failing and notifying you of the failure? Or is it that you go to open the file the next time and it's corrupt>> The only time I ever cannot save a file to the local drive is when I get the dialogue informing me that the file is corrupt. It refuses to save the file. No file will appear. If I plug in an external drive, it will save to that drive, anywhere on that drive. It is not a situation where it is saving 0k files in various places. It is a situation where it will not save to the local drive. The file that becomes the 0k file is the file that I started with. <<I'm trying to better define what you mean by "out of the blue" in your previous message. I'm considering that autosave is a file save just like you had initiated it. With that definition, does "out of the blue" mean you're working on a file and you get a save failure message at either manual save or autosave time? Or does "out of the blue" mean you never saw any indication that any file was saved improperly, but you go to open a file on disk and it's corrupt?>> Mark, I am saying that in my experience file corruption is apparently not related to saving at all. I'm just working away and the dialog appears. Now maybe, the file corruption occured just before I got a notice asking me if I wanted to save the file (It's something like "this file has not been saved in x minutes, would you like to save it now?") but I don't know that. And, again, I never give the program authorization to save a file without my consent. So if saving is going on, or an attempt to save is going on, I cannot explain why it would do such a thing. It does seem that something happened in the background. I thought the pdf bug was significant because it is evidence, here at least, that in saving a file, which involves protecting the original and then replacing it with the saved file, the process is malfunctioning and the original file is getting hosed. This resembles closely what is happening in the corruption bug. Good luck. Regards, Donald

Hi Mark, <<Regarding the first paragraph of your 2/21 post, are you saying that you get VW file corruptions sometimes (and only sometimes) when you try to save to your local drive, but when you then save that file to an external drive it saves ok?>> Yes, exactly. <<When you do see the corruptions is it notifying you at file save time with the "This file is corrupted on disk..." message?>> No, not at file save time. Just out of the blue. I never save without a reminder that requries me to click "ok". I just tried the pdf test again and I got a zero k file when I said it was ok to replace it with the new file. Did you try this on a machine running 10.3.9? Regards, Donald

The wall join tool (with use of the proper join mode) will correctly join and heal the walls.>> In my experience it does not work as perfectly as the statement suggests it will. Sometimes, even using the proper join mode, I get artifacts I cannot completely resolve. Amy, let us know if you found it to work the way you want. Regards, Donald

This kind of thing has always frustrated me. In my world evey line means something. Lines that don't mean anything shouldn't be there. Little things like that have kept me from embracing the wall tool for years now. Lately I have experimented a bit more and I think it may have gotten better. It is still at times a frustrating tool. Here are a couple things to try: If you are using fills (like solid white), make sure the line weight for the fill is zero. Also, walls seem to join a little better if you drag one wall well into the other before joining. (like in the 't' you circled at the bottom.) Try turning end caps off. Eager to hear from other wall tool experts. Regards, Donald

Jonathan, Noted. But more often than not, the hints are so context driven that you don't really need to read them, you just need to know there is a hint. Regards, Donald

It does that every now and then (change to the yellow background) on its own. I find it is necessary to go into preferences and reset it. Regards, Donald

FWIW, I'm using 65397 and I don't think it solves the problem. Regards, Donald

No. But I found I needed one nearby because when the problem arises I can't save to local drive. In my experience the problem is unrelated to either autosave on or to a network server. Everything is local. Seems to be something very basic and I think it is related to the pdf bug I mentioned. If you missed it. when you export to pdf (quartz only) and you end up with a file and a name .pdf, and you then export again the same file and it tells you there is already a file by that name, and it asks you whether you'd like to replace it, and you say yes.... It doesn't just replace the file. It makes it a 0k file, just like what we experience with our other file corruption issues. You can try it at home. It's repeatable. Big file, little file, doesn't matter. So in my opinion the corruption problem is about the way vectorworks writes to files and protects them in the process. The pdf bug is an example of how it is failing to do this properly. I have a friend who is a very senior programmer at Adobe. He could write you a love letter in 0's and 1's. His ability to find bugs is legendary and I imagine it annoys a lot of people around him. He says that sometimes they find a nasty bug, and they see it working, and they realize, "there's no way to fix this without re-writing a whole really big chunk of code" and they decide that its better to fix 10 other bugs than that one. I paraphrase, but you get the idea. Regards, Donald

Indeed. I agree with Nicolas completely. Regards, Donald

Today I noticed a corruption problem with the export to pdf (quartz only) command. If I export a pdf, say I call it 2.pdf, and it works fine. But if I export another with the same name, it asks if I want to replace the one that already exists with that name. I say yes. Now it is a 0k (pdf) file. I've done this a couple times. Regards, Donald

My big toe says something about MacOS, memory, autocad and classes. Note, however, that Charlie is running 3 gigs of RAM. Also one of my problem files had no autocad history. The crashes I've had are usually preceded by disk activity (sound). The file corruption is sudden and without warning. It seems like there is a rogue background process, one that needs to learn to heel. I'd say there is a statistically significant sample now. Regards, Donald

There's an old joke about three golfers. On the 11th hole one of them, Fred, had a heart attack and died. For eight holes it was, hit the ball and drag Fred. Sooo., It happens again this morning. A dialogue, "The file has been corrupted on disk..." As in reduced from 10mb to 0kb. Same conditions, equip. etc. as my first post. In fact it seems impossible to save to the hard drive I'm using when prompted by the dialogue. So I've learned a couple things. 1. Start the day with a duplicate of the file. 2. Keep an external drive near by to save (pun intended) the file. This time I didn't lose anything. File is back where it was. Saving fine again. Frustrating. Regards, Donald

<<Another thing is that sometimes when you are in edit mode the selection handles will let you click-then-drag...and then all of the sudden you are in click-and-hold-to-drag...very intermittent behavoir.>> I have noticed this too. Also, sometimes I get text with the smart cursor when it is not supposed to. The workaround I use is to go into preferences and out a couple times to cycle first to the preference I don't want (which I'm getting) and then once to the preference I do. Very intermittent and random. Regards, Donald

Ok, I sent the file. I also figured out what the problem with dimensions not being selectable was. Class visibility was set to "show snap others." Do that and you can't select dimensions when none class is active. Changing to show, snap, modify others solves that problem. I still have a couple objects I can't select, but tomorrow's another day. Regards, Donald

I found a solution to the problem. Out of view in the design layer I was working on, there were two floor plans which had been pasted with their keynotes (but no legend). One I deleted all the callouts on those plans, the new keynotes and keynote legend works as it should. I conclude that copying keynotes from one layer to another, even unintentionally, is not a good idea. Regards, Donald

Island Man, I always appreciate your thoughts very much, but animated avatars are not clever. In my sleep I think I have come up with a couple observations which are probably significant. 1. Keynote callouts and keynote legends are working fine in all the other locations in the file. 2. The problem keynotes and legend are occurring on a design layer that exists with other design layers to form a saved sheet. It started out empty. I then pasted in a plan, with some keynote callouts. Then I deleted the callouts and edited the plan. After that keynotes are bonkers. Something about introducing callouts (and no legend) onto a blank layer and then deleting the callouts seems to affect afterwards how keynotes and keynote legends behave on the layer. Regards, Donald PS Islandman, I really do appreciate your thoughts.

I?ve never experienced so many program irregularities with a version of Vectorworks as I am experiencing with Architect 12.5.1. Today for example, there was a time when I could place dimensions but not select them. New dimensions, old dimensions, no matter. I got rid of a couple unnecessary classes, quit Vectorworks, restarted the computer and the problem went away. Then this evening I?m laying down keynotes, which were working fine earlier today, and starting on a layer with no keynotes I can?t put one down without it bringing up a legend containing a bunch, but not all, of the keynotes I placed on other layers earlier today. Instead of getting note no. 1, I?d get note number 15. I got around that problem by editing the legend and deleting all the notes but the new one. But it?s still screwy. Everytime I place a new keynote, all the others in this layer renumber. If I double click on the legend and simply click ok, the order of notes changes. So I can?t really control at all, anymore, where a note occurs in the list. The numbering becomes random when I would prefer there be some logic to the order of which notes are read first. There are just too many frustrations with Vectorworks at this time. Regards, Donald

Katie, I've had this problem of file data loss with two different files, in the last 3 weeks. The first file had workgroup references and viewports, the second did not. I'm not having problems with all files. I made a second copy of the original file and have been working on the second copy without further problems. It seems the problems followed the class deletion work I was doing. There were a jillion classes in the autocad file so I was deleted many many classes with one delete action. So either things are random, or something I did stressed the file out. Only thing I can say for sure, based on my experience and readings here, is that some files are getting corrupted. Haven't seen problems of that kind in a very long time. Haven't had any problems since the last mac 12.5.1 updater. Regards, Donald

A few years back I had a problem like that. Not walls actually, but lines running across the drawing that should not be there. I think one work around was to export the file to vectorscript then reimport. Regards, Donald

Thanks Don, OS installs are a big chore and, everything has been working fine except vw. Your point about RAM is well taken but still hard to get used to. When I started running Minicad I had 5mb RAM and a 105 mb hard drive. I was so glad I upgraded from the 4mb standard machine. I think the manual was stapled. Regards, Donald

Hi Katie, From post: <<as not using an autosave back up file. Was not autosaving without an ok. No workgroup references. No server. Local machine only.>> Regards, Donald

I've completely lost another file. That's twice since upgrading to architect. Lost a mornings work this time. Here are the details. Although this could be something local, I suspect there is still something not right with vectorworks as others have also reported problems with vw crashing. A colleague I'm working with has a new macbook pro that has also started having problems not being able to open vectorworks files and crashing vectorworks in the process. 12.5.1. Mac OS X 10.3.9. 512 mb ram. While working I got an alert saying that the file had become corrupted and I needed to save it to a different location or the entire file would be lost. I tried saving to desktop. N.G. I tried exporting as older VW files. N.G. 3mb file became 0kb file. This file started as a file created by someone else. I worked on a duplicate. It needed to be adapted for a new variation on the original project. it had a lot of classes---probably because at some point an autocad file was directly imported. I reduced the classes to dimension and none. then created a class "Acad" to hold imported data. I noticed some odd behavior when cleaning stuff out of the file. Objects which would display, but which could not be selected. There were some objects which I could only delete by deleting the class or layer. Maybe there was something wrong with this file at the start. Would have been good to know. Then I imported some autocad data into a new file. Then I deleted the classes and dumped the data into none. Then I created an Acad class and assigned that to all the objects. Then I copied one of the floor plans and pasted it into the VW file I was working on, as a group. Then I ungrouped it and deselected the objects. At this point they could not be reselected. That didn't seem right so I undid back prior to the paste. Tried it again. Similar results, then the message that file was hosed. Permissions check out fine. Disk utility reports volume appears to be ok. No problems or strange behavior with any other applications or files. Was not using an autosave back up file. Was not autosaving without an ok. No workgroup references. No server. Local machine only. Regards, Donald