aersloat

I just switched from an external USB drive to a usb drive hooked up through a new airport n basestation. I just tried opening a file I was working on last week and it is corrupted. 12.5.1, new build. No one has reported any corruption issues yet at the office saving to a tiger server (I'm remote). After some additional sleuthing, the file became corrupt as soon as it was moved to the airdisk. Each day I work on a file I duplicate the last saved file. In this case, the file was moved, duplicated, opened, and not saved or modified. It became corrupt (not zero length though). VW reports an error on open, says it will try to open with as much data as possible, then crashes. I recovered from the last good version and have been working with it for the past 90 minutes or so. Autosave is on but only with confirmation and it is not set to a separate backup. VW just reported the corrupt file warning while working and I saved to the desktop. This was a few minutes after the last autosave dialog if I recall correctly.

One frustration that we have with the callout tool is the difficulty in aligning the text boxes. We always want part of the text box aligned rather than part of the leader. With the callout tool the align command just doesn't work. It always tries to align the leader. If we are annotating a detail it would be handy to select all the notes on the left side, say, and use the align tool to align them to the left without affecting where the leader is pointing too. It seems that the callout tool as it currently exists is leader-centric rather than text-centric. That approach makes the tool far less efficient to use.

As long as we are getting well off topic I will chime in. VW's new Sketch rendering mode is vastly different in function than SketchUp. SketchUp is intended for rapid predesign and schematic design in an interactive 3d world. It is aimed directly at architecture and is very similar in purpose (but an evolutionary milestone ahead) to the old ModelShop and the seemingly dormant DesignWorkshop. You can do most of what SketchUp can do in VW, but at a huge cost of efficiency. SketchUp has rendering, callouts, dimensioning, etc., but while you could put together working drawings in SketchUp you would be foolish to do so. You could do working drawings in FormZ too, but that doesn't make it a good idea. I don't think that VW's Sketch mode is intended for designing. It is a presentation tool. SketchUp can squiggle lines too, but again, it is more for presentation.

Ahh. I did a quick search but didn't see anything. Thanks.

We have used batch printing successfully when sending a set to our plotter; however, we just tried to batch print a set of sheets to pdf. The script runs and claims to be printing all sheets but only the first sheet gets written. I have confirmed this with another unrelated file and another computer. We have tried both the "save as pdf..." option as well as changing the output option to pdf. Doesn't make a difference. Both files are converted 10.5.1 files. Both machines 10.3.4 w/VWA 11. One file had 12 sheets, the other 5.

FYI, Dr. Software has some products that are still in development. I don't know if I would call Dr. Frame 3D "simple" though. FWIW, we use it in our office. http://www.drsoftware-home.com/df3d/df3d.html

Just so you guys know... if you do have embedded images in your file and you use Panther's save to pdf feature you can compress those images by using the "Reduce File Size" Quartz filter under ColorSync in the print dialog. You can also bind sheets quite easily using the free "Combine PDFs" Program (look on versiontracker.com). If you need more control, like selective font embedding, Distiller is the way to go. Although we have Distiller we have not used it for producing pdfs for a very long time. This, of course, has nothing to do with Suzanne's issue.

You may not have the 1055CM set up as a postscript printer from your windoze systems. You may want to try and do that and see if there is any improvement. There may not be, but it is worth a try.

I don't know how well it works, but you can open a pdf file with GraphicConverter and save it as a .plt (or .hpgl) file. Might as well give it a try...

Mark Another firm that we do some work with uses a vectorscript to translate pen colors to black lines with weight (and back again) just before plotting. If you used standardized colors this should be pretty easy and unobtrusive to do. You might want to give this a go.

quote: Originally posted by Katie: Any application will run in classic mode. Whoa, Katie. That's not true. Only carbon applications can run in the Classic environment (cocoa based applications cannot) -- and if your carbon application is encased in a package then it can be tricky to get it to start in classic as sometimes the "open in the Classic environment" checkbox is missing. Some carbon applications like Microsoft Office X also simply lack the proper resources to run under OS9 or in the Classic environment-- despite the fact that they are carbon.

Could you clarify a bit... are you printing it from the Preview application? What kind of plotter/printer are you outputting to? What driver are you using? Have you tried deleting and recreating your printer/plotter in Print Center?

Do you have the same problem if you print to a postscript file using the LaserWriter 8 drivers and then convert to PDF using Distiller? You should also try previewing the .ps file using MacGhostView (look on www.versiontracker.com) to see if you have the same problem in the raw postscript file. If you don't have the same problems using Distiller then I would suggest abandoning PDF writer and switching to a Distiller workflow. Having Distiller processing a watched folder can be pretty transparent.

Look in the printing section for some discussion. I think that in most cases this error indicates a corrupted font.

Kurt, By the way, I just got an Asante FR1004al to replace my Ugate (I needed better wireless range) and the print server in the asante doesn't work for me. The problem is that the parallel port on the asante is unidirectional and stalls on some more complicated jobs. My old Ugate, and others like I think the SMC barricade, are bi-directional.