Art V

I addition to Jim Kelly's questions... Did you try running it as administrator? I've had something similar happen in the past on Windows Vista on a laptop and running it as administrator made the program to open. (On Windows Vista on the desktop it worked normally). Reinstalling it as administrator may or may not solve the issue, for me it didn't until after a complete system reinstall, then it worked normally again and it no longer was necessary to run it as administrator. Disabling anti-virus or internet security software during reinstallation may help too sometimes.

There is a solution that may work for you. The Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxemburg) distributor has a translation tool on their website to translate older file versions of Minicad (v5 or later) to a Vectorworks 10.5 file. It can be found at: http://www.vectorworks.be/support/softwaredownloads/ Scroll all the way down where it says "Diversen" and then click on "Vertaalprogramma" and it should start the download of the translation software. The Mac version only works on OS9

Sean, Have you tried using a design layer viewport (DLVP) to create the cropped area?

Chris, How will this affect VW performance if a DLVP is used as you suggest? Think of a location of approx. 10km x 10km, with 300k-500k+ objects, in an UTM grid with metres as unit. And then I have to start putting my stuff on top of that. Would you suggest to put everyting at origin and DLVP the whole thing to coordinates, or put the location at coordinates, my stuff at origin and DLVP it on top of the location? I know, I can try myself, but if you say there will be a noticable decrease performance in your case, even if it is not very big, then I can probably save myself the trouble (unless you have similar drawings regarding size and number of objects where you are doing this).

Grant, What are the settings you are using? A few things I can think of: - rerendering viewports before exports is turned off? - rerendering parametric objects before exports is turned off? If for some reason the viewport is not properly rendered even though it seems to look ok then it may happen that sometimes a fill does not export. I had something similar happen in the past, and even with both options turned on the fill would not export into the PDF. The only option that seemed to work in that particular case was to create a second object underneath with the proper fill and leave the original object above it without fill.

A few suggestions based on my experience with importing dwg files: 1. set units manually to the correct one(i.e. don't let vw guess as that may give erronous units and result in the wrong scale) 2. turn off the matching of units if that means it may switch the units from e.g. mm to m (I am using the Dutch version so not sure which of the two possibilities it may refer to) 3. use the "use orignal coordinates" option (or whatever the exact name is in VW2012) this in combination with the correct units should put the import on the correct coordinates and scale. 4. In case this applies... set the import scale to the same scale as the existing layers, if you are in a layer with a different scale when hovering over a location, you will get incorrect readouts. If there is also a geodetic projection involved, then setting the proper projection before importing might save some of the issues as well.

Ian, It might be possible there is something in the dwg/dxf file from ArchiCad that VW is having a problem with. You could try using Autodesk DWG TrueView (free and can be downloaded from the Autodesk website) to save it in an earlier dwg version or resave it and use the audit and fix errors option of TrueDWGview and try importing it again in VW. Sometimes there is a small glitch in the dwg/dxf file that may get fixed this way and solve the import issue.

What was your previous operating system, I'm not sure VectorWorks 12 will work properly under Windows 7. Another possibility is that you have received dwg/dxf files that are new than VectorWorks 2012 can handle. The insufficient memory could be an indication for that. You could try using TrueDWG View from Autodesk (free and can be downloaded from www.autodesk.com) to convert the dwg/fxf files to an earlier version that Vectorworks 12 can import.

Colin, unfortunately VW importing dwg files does give the file size increas you are describing, I'm suffering from a similar issue. The file size of dwg imports in VW2011 is double that of dwg imports in VW2009, the difference might exist between VW2009 and VW2010 (I skipped VW2010) So there is a kind of workaround for the filesize, but only if you also have VW2009 (or 2008). If I import the dwg file into VW2009 first and then open the VW2009 file in 2011, the overall file size will increase by about 30%. Perhaps the same will apply to VW2010 I.e. this way your imported dwg file might be 65% of the size it would be if you import dwg files directly into VW2010.

Alain, In case you still don't have success with exporting the DXF file... Why are you exporting to DXF, i.e what do you want to with the DXF file or is there a specific need for using DXF? In other words, maybe your goal can be achieved by using a different export format?

Pat, Thanks for the info, this helps a lot. :-) I once asked if VW had something similar to AutoCAD's layer state manager and the answer then was no, so I didn't search any further. Which means this particular wish list item can be considered withdrawn.

Have you checked with VW support if having two (different) video cards in one machine could be a problem, esp. now that the graphics rendering has been updated in VW2011?

Did you check if Vectorworks has access rights to certain folders it needs to be able to access? (i.e not just read but also write access) Your IT may have restricted access to certain system folders and perhaps this is causing VW not being able to access required files and therefore it fails to start up. VW tech support should be able to tell you which for which files/folders VW needs to be able to have read/write access. Edit: I'm not specifying those files/folders here as they might be different from the NL installations and don't want to create confusion on this.

I've been fiddling with EPS files, but it seems that VW cannot convert them the same way as it can with PDFs. Did you try to create the curve in 3D in VW, create a 2D view and export that to PDF and then import this PDF back into VW and then convert/ungroup etc.? Maybe the curve would not get lost that way?

The ability to create sets of classes and design layers in which each class/design layer can be set to visible or invisible would be nice. I often have various options in a single file, sharing the same base items. For each option certain classes and/or layers need to be turned off and others need to be turned on. Sometimes there are a lot of classes and layers, especially if the drawing also contains imported dwg files. If those can be grouped into a set which can be activated/deactivated so that the classes/layers in the set are automatically turned on or off as specified in the set, this would be really convenient and save quite a bit of time. For those familiar with AutoCAD, this would be similar to the layer state manager.

AutoCAD has text styles that define the fonts, size etc. Vectorworks has that too, but does not import/export text styles from/to dwg files so roundtrip editing of dwg files is not possible that aspect. Vectorworks being able to import/export text styles from/to dwg files would increase compatibility with the AutoCAD world quite a bit. As it is now Vectorworks cannot be properly used for some types of relatively simple drafting work because it cannot properly handle text styles in the dwg import/export unless one is prepared to fix this in AutoCAD afterwards, which can be very tedious if there is quite a bit of text.

It would be nice if Vectorworks PDF export would include the units and the scale of the exported sheet layer into the PDF so that measuring tools in Acrobat would automatically show the correct real world lengths/dimensions etc.

Count me in on a request for 3D PDF export. Acrobat 9 Pro Extended could turn 3DS files exported from VW into 3D PDFs but Adobe decided to drop the 3D conversion with Acrobat X and outsource it to a 3rd party plugin. Having the ability to export it directly from Vectorworks should create better quality PDFs as well (I hope)

Something I just remembered... Did you check whether the drawing is on a screen plane or layer plane? If the latter that may cause unexpected results when exporting as it remains to be seen whether it gets exported as 2D, 3D or a combination of 2D and 3D. I got "warned" for potential issues when I asked about compatibility with VW2009 which does not support layer plane for 2D.

I don't know what the cause might be but I did notice that imported dwg/dxf files are twice as big in VW2011 than in VW2009 so it is possible that changes in the DWG/DXF import/export are causing your problem. If you have access to a windows machine or can use bootcamp or other virtual machine running windows, what you or the company doing the laser cutting could try is to get Autodesk DWG Trueview (windows only and a free download from www.autodesk.com) and have Trueview convert the dxf file and in the conversion setup also check the box for fixing errors.

2D or 3D?

What is the file size of the jpeg images? I don't know for sure about VW2011's limits but in VW2009 if the file size was too large it would not export the image part into a PDF.

I just doublechecked by opening a PDF exported from VW2011 by using the PDF export option. It does not give the real world sizes but the rescaled sizes. (i.e. a 1000m scale bar on a PDF with scale 1:12500 gives 80mm as measured distance and not 1000m) Unless things changed Vectorworks does seem to have a license from Adobe to use their PDF engine to create PDFs so it one would expect that VW can include the additional information on units and scale into the exported PDFs. So I guess we have do a wish-list item coming up.

There is a converter to convert Minicad 5 (and later) files to Vectorworks 10.5 files. I didn't find it on the US website, so I'm providing the link on the website of the Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg) distributor. http://www.vectorworks.be/support/softwaredownloads/ Scroll down to "Diversen" and you will find links for the Mac version (OS 9 only) and the Windows version.

Too bad that even turning off UAC didn't work. I've just been tinkering with the laptop and turning off UAC made VW2011 (and 2009) run without having to run it as admin. Turning UAC off (or on) does require a restart, I assume you did do a restart of the computer. I've also tried the reliability monitor in Vista and noticed that doubleclicking the VW2011 shortcut when UAC was still on does make VW2011 start up, but it stalls at loading quicktime.qts and nothing else loads and then VW2011 disappears within a few seconds. In the reliability monitor, when you expand "disk" you may see VW2011 come up and try to load other files. Columns are Image/Process/File etc. Image = VW2011 File = file that VW2011 is trying to load When running VW2009 as admin, it also loads DLL's and other stuff required for the program to work. Maybe you could try to start up VW2011 while the reliability monitor is active with the "disk" part expanded and see if VW2011 does come up at all, and if yes how much it does (or doesn't) load. Perhaps that may give VW tech support an idea of where to look. It seems that in my case UAC is indeed the culprit on the laptop, but it does beg the question why this does UAC issue not always happen (the problem does not (yet)exist on the desktop). It also occurred to me that you are using a laptop, and the only times I ran into this issue was with laptops, never with desktops. This cold be coincidence though.