aersloat

quote: Originally posted by Matthew Giampapa: (It's that or it could be the fact that she was running a development copy of VW 10 at the time) Geez... don't tease us like that.

Is everyone using the most recent version of the Artlantis export plugin? They updated the export plug-in in May. No, the export is not just a straight export. You can preserve some material settings as well as update the geometry of a previously exported model. Remember that you have to add/update the plugin with the workspace editor. [ 08-09-2002: Message edited by: aersloat ]

.otf is Adobe's OpenType font technology. Usually Adobe .otf fonts have "pro" in their name. I have a few .otf files in System/Library, but they are named in Kanji-- in the info box one of them claims to be Hiragino Maru Gothic Pro W4. Anyway, The only Adobe product I have installed is Acrobat. In any event, no application should install fonts in /System/Library they should be in /Library, ~/Library, or /System Folder/Fonts-- so Hiragino Maru Gothic must be from Apple. Did you install any of the Language kits, or language kit updates?

Hardware test is a good start, however, even hardware test will not necessarily find bad RAM. We had a cube that would work fine for a while and then out of the blue it would panic. Turned out to be bad RAM, even though it passed hardware test and every other test we could find. It ran OS9 fine without failure, but OSX uses memory far more efficiently and will fill up your dimms. I think photoshop uses its own swap file for most of its memory usage. Don't know about illustrator. If you lack ram then OSX will start using swap space on your hard disk. The only thing that you should see is a performance decrease. If the speed is okay and you don't notice that your hd is churning away then 384 should be okay.

We have a 1055cm and are plotting with 10.1.5. I haven't seen any cropping marks on our plots. We rarely plot E size, usually we plot D with the driver set to "rotate true." I am curious about why you have any Adobe software involved. All you need is the 1055cm PPD with 10.1.x's built in postscript driver. The HP installer (make sure you have the most current one from their site) will let you do a PPD only install. You then just need to select in the print center application when creating a new printer. We plot over LPR from a few different machines.

Yeah, really... kerning isn't even in all word processing packages, much less in most CAD packages.

UrbanMyth, It depends a bunch on what platform you are on. On Mac OSX you can generate pretty good tiff files (and PDFs) from the print preview option. A program like GraphicConverter can save a tiff out as a .plt file-- which is an HPGL/2 file. Your mileage may vary on this one. For native plt generation you can try MacPlot. We haven't used it in years so I don't know how well it works.

Our cad guys have been plotting non-stop for the last day and a half using the black background workaround and so far I have not heard of any problems.

It should go without saying-- but I'll say it anyway-- if you install over 10.1.5, make sure you back up you user folder before doing so. Your settings, prefs, mail, etc are all in there. Any documents on your desktop also live in your user folder. One of the few things that doesn't live in your users folder are any custom VW workspaces. Make a backup of those if they are important to you. Katie-- we haven't noticed any problems with other applications yet. If we do, we'll let you know.

All our CAD machines were updated last night. I just asked our CAD folk if they were having any trouble. One of our drafters pugnatiously refuses to draw on anything but a black background (he still claims it has nothing to do with an affinity for AutoCAD). His white (inversed) text has been fine. Rather than tell me they were having trouble, the others just switched to a black background and are happily working away. After all that time that I spent convincing them that a white background was better. Aarrggh!

I don't know much about W2K, but I can tell you generally that if you can print to the device from any application, then VW can print to it as well. VW does not require postscript. The source of confusion is probably from the lack of manufacturer's plotter drivers for MacOS-- which means we either have to buy a third party driver (like microspot's) or buy a postscript plotter (since postscript devices are supported by Apple's and Adobe's drivers.) [ 04-26-2002: Message edited by: aersloat ]

I don't know either, but bitmap images certainly take up a bunch of space. As far as your converted black and white images go... make sure that after you "convert" them the bit depth is also changing. There should be a marked difference in the size of the file in the finder before and after doing a color to black & white conversion. You also may want to play around with various image import formats-- try jpeg, etc. I don't know how VW deals with bitmap image compression, but there may be some differences between formats. You may find graphicconverter (www.lemkesoft.de) a faster tool than photoshop for trying various format iterations.

You might be able to batch export using an AppleScript calling a VectorScript which has the "DoMenuTextByName" procedure... I really don't know. The easiest way might be to use QuicKeys to call the dialogs, etc. The print sheets command will print the sheets you have set up one by one. Basically it just activates a sheet and then calls up the print dialog.

I would spend your money on maxing out your RAM to 1.5 GB, dropping in as fast a hard drive as you can (or look into www.sonnettech.com's tempo raid 133, or similar) and one of those NVIDIA GeForce4 Titanium graphics cards. If you are working with large files which are bogging down, I really think that you will have a better bang for the buck maxing out the above rather than going for the faster processor.

This is a bit off topic, but for the rendering-types out there... Back in January LBL released v 3.4 of Radiance, their Rendering/Lighting simulation package. The interesting part is that they have posted pre-compiled binaries for OSX. There are a few different user-contributed geometry import filters for various CAD formats, but most are pretty old. It would be interesting if people started playing around with Radiance and VectorWorks. Rendering quality has gotten so much better over the years that the real benefit of Radiance now is in the lighting simulation. Anyway, Radiance is free and can be found at http://radsite.lbl.gov

Way back in the day I tried using GraphicConverter to output HPGL files into one of those windows-based squiggle programs. It didn't really work very well, but who knows, maybe things have improved. Maybe I will play around with that later. Unfortunately, I don't know of an HPGL previewer on the Mac. By the way, GraphicConverter is a fantastic program. It has been well carbonized and works well under OSX. It is shareware and I don't think the unregistered version has any features disabled, it just takes a while to launch. You should try it out. It is a great software value.

That is kind of an unfair teaser. I guess we will have to wait until next week to find out.

Sure... I don't know what their OCE thinks is a compatible TIFF file, but one way to find out would be to "borrow" a TIFF file from them and open it up in GraphicConverter. GC can open almost anything, and will tell you a little about the file as well. There is a good chance that you could take your Preview-generated TIFF and convert it to an OCE-friendly TIFF. GC is shareware so you can try this out w/o cost www.lemkesoft.de

Ah yes... Preview will save a pdf file OR a tiff file. In fact, when you click "preview" out of the print dialog and the Preview.app launches, if you just click Save as... , as opposed to Save as PDF, you will get a TIFF file, just what you were looking for. Hope this helps Another thing... if you have the full version of Adobe Acrobat you can extract TIFF images from sheets in a pdf file. [ 04-03-2002: Message edited by: aersloat ] [ 04-03-2002: Message edited by: aersloat ]

You can set up "Sheets" which can be a combinations of visible layers and classes. In VW each layer has only one scale. Arrange everything on screen the way you want it and then print the "sheet" to a postscript file using the Laserwriter 8 printer driver (or equivalent). You can take this .ps file to your service bureau. Another easier way would be to have your service bureau download the free VW viewer application. You can save sheets for easy access. DXF is not the way to go in this situation.

Networking Windows to an OSX machine will be a bit more difficult than to an OSX Server machine, and in truth, I haven't tried it. However, Samba is freely available and should work fine. I have used Samba on FreeBSD and Linux before with some success so I imagine that it will be about the same with OSX. If you are doing fine without OSX server than I would skip it. Look for "Samba" on versiontracker and it comes up with a few hits. You can also install fink and compile/install samba through that avenue. I haven't done any speed tests with VPC5 on OSX. I do know that on my iBook it is slower than VPC4 on my old 292 Wallstreet. We also have just upgraded our license to VPC over the years-- not our Windows license-- so we still run W95. I don't know what difference any of the newer OS's will make. We also haven't bothered to upgrade our ACAD licenses, so a newer version of ACAD might also run very differently on VPC. I would try out VPC first and run it for a day or two, but in the end it will probably be easier to do the 600 box deal since you will be generating you stuff in AutoCAD. Good luck.

Oh, I hate it when a client asks you to sell your soul to the devil. We used to have a mixed environment with our CAD machines running AutoCAD. All our machines connected to an AppleShare IP 6.X server. It worked pretty well. A few questions: Do you have OS X Server, or are you just using OS X as a server? Are you intending to generate all your drawing on AutoCAD now, or are you going to do most of the work in VectorWorks and then convert and do some touchup in AutoCAD? If you are only going to do light work in AutoCAD and have G4's, then VirtualPC is something that could work well for you. We use VirtualPC to do occasional work on AutoCAD. Networking tends to be easier in VirtualPC than in real PCs because you can share OSX volumes and folders, ie piggyback on top of your connected OSX machine. VirtualPC also does a pretty good job of connecting directly to OSX Server. Virtual PC is not lightning fast on OSX, although it is plenty usable on a G4. Give it lots of RAM (your virtual machine, not the application) and when possible run it in full screen mode so you don't have to take a Quartz speed hit. Despite Virtual PC's usability, if you are going to be doing all your CAD in AutoCAD it may be easier to just buy some PCs. We have only connected Virtual PC to our OSX server, but it seems to work very well. Anyway, good luck.

The HP RIP only supports postscript-- that is the whole point. Think of the HP RIP as a standalone postscript printer. You can dump postscript straight to it (ever dropped a .ps file directly on a postscript desktop printer in OS9?) or you can send postscript information to it through a postscript printer driver-- like Apple's Laserwriter 8 driver. PDF files are not postscript-- which is why your RIP software can't understand them. Its job is to take postscript input and convert (or "RIP") it into something that you plotter can understand-- in this case probably HPGL/2. So, to print a PDF file to your HP RIP you need to print it with Acrobat and either Adobe's PS Printer Driver or Apple's Laserwriter 8. That will convert the .pdf file back into a .ps file that the RIP software can understand. You can, of course, just generate .ps files straight from vectorworks using Apple's Laserwriter 8 software and either save to file, or setting up a dedicated "translator" desktop printer. Printing from Preview works because it is just rendering the PDF image and sending the data through the printer driver, which is converting the data back into postscript for transmission to the HP RIP. Not all PDF renderers are equal and you may find that something that works in Preview may not work in Acrobat and something that works in Acrobat may not work in Preview. I would expect this to be especially true when dealing with things like fills and embedded graphics. Has anyone tried using Ghostscript on OSX to communicate with the HP 455CA? That might be an option besides relying on HP's RIP software.

If you send one of those pdf files to a postscript laser printer do you have the same problems?

If you do some poking around the printing/plotting discussion area as well as in some previous topics there are extensive discussions on the various methods of creating pdf files in OSX, including workarounds for several issues, such as getting appropriate sheet sizes.