Art V

The same problem happened to me with VW2009 after installing the VW2011 US trial version and updating to SP1. When I tried to switch to another drawing via the window (or view, not sure about the name in the English version) menu it makes no difference which drawing I selected, it always stayed in the active drawing. There were other issues with VW2009 as well after installing the VW2011 US trial version, so I deinstalled the trial. The problem with switching windows remained, and even removing all folders, files and registry entries I could locate of both VW2011 trial and VW2009 and reinstalling VW2009 did not solve the problem. If I tile the documents, then I can switch between document windows by clicking in the window of the document that I want to become active, but still not through the window (or view) menu.

Another option could be to output the drawing to a PDF file and then use Acrobat or Acrobat Reader to plot the PDF file. You may want to try plotting with "Auto-Rotate and Center" ticked on. If the printer driver works properly in combination with Acrobat it should print in the most economical orientation.

ekashinsky, As far as I can tell VectorWorks is not colour management aware at all, so my guess would be not to use the built-in PDF conversion but print via Adobe Acrobat Standard or Professional instead to create a PDF file Acrobat Standard/Professional is colour management aware, so you can use its colour management options to get a more consistent output. If you have the ICC profile of the printer you can have that included in the PDF settings file as well when you print via Acrobat. Assuming that VectorWorks' colour output is consistent, this may be as close as you can get with VectorWorks for the time being. With consistent colour output I mean that a colour will come out the same way each time when printed on the same printer with the same batch of ink/toner and paper, regardless of whether the colour is accurate or not. On another printer the colour may come out differently, but that is because of the printer and not necessarily because of VectorWorks. If VectorWorks' colour output is not consistent, then no colour management system is going to be of much help and you might as well do without colour management.

Thom, You can get the angle etc. in several ways: The easy way is to use VectorWorks: 1. draw a (polygon) triangle with the horizontal line being 3 times the vertical line 2. use the arc dimension tool to dimension the angle between the horizontal line and the diagonal, this will give you the angle. 3. dimension the diagonal and it will give you the length 4. because you also know the lenght of the horizontal, you can calculate the ratio of the horizontal and diagonal distances. Another, more classical, way is to use the sinus/cosines/tangent calculations Since you already know the horizontal and vertical distances, you can calculate the tangent e.g. tan = vertical length/horizontal length So with a 1:3 ratio the tan = 1/3 = 0.3333 inverse tangent then gives the angle, which is 18.4349 degrees. With Pythagoras formula you can calculate the length of the diagonal.

islandmon, Thanks for responding. Maybe I should have been more clear in my question. The Dutch version mentions two things when creating a fence: - create by distance - create by slope In the latter case you can set two things: - maximum distance - maximum angle of the slope The documentation states that "maximum distance" is the maximum extent to which the slope of the fence will go. Maximum angle is simply the maximum angle of the slope, and this suggests that VectorWorks may use a smaller angle. In this case the distance of the slope is less important when it is going in other directions than inbetween two leveled areas, and depending on the terrain the slope distance can vary greatly from one edge of an area to another edge. I assumed the "maximum distance" setting will prevent the slope from going on indefinitely. What I need to be absolutely sure of is that regardless of the slope distance, the ratio will be exact throughout the entire slope (e.g. 1:3 in my example) in all directions. Maybe it is a matter of somewhat inaccurate translation into the Dutch VectorWorks and that the "maximum angle" simply should have been "angle". In your experience, is the angle you get when creating a fence the same as the angle you typed into the settings dialog, or have you experienced smaller angles as well? If you have experienced smaller angles, do you happen to know VectorWorks can be forced to use the exact ratio (or angle) that one wants to achieve? Thanks in advancefor any help or insight.

Scott, Did you do a "cleanup" of the drawing to clean up non-used images? (Edit menu>Cleanup or something like that. I'm using the Dutch version so I'm guessing for the actual command name in English) It looks to me that somehow the reference to the JPEGs is still in the document and maybe a cleanup will fix that.

For a project I need to determine the location of leveled areas relative to each other based on a fixed slope ratio (e.g. 1:3) and the height difference. Once the area locations have been determined, a cut and fill calculation will be done. For example: slope ratio 1:3 level area 1 = +30m level area 2 = +10m This will result in a 60m wide slope between the two areas. The documentation mentions a maximum distance and maximum angle for the fence slope settings. If I understand it correctly this means the angle might be less than the mandatory ratio but I need the slope of the fence to be an exact ratio (or angle which can be derived from the ratio). My guess was to set the maximum distance greater than the largest distance between two areas and the maximum angle at the desired angle, but the somewhat ambiguous documentation does not give me enough confidence this will work. How can I make sure that the slope of the fence has exactly an e.g. 1:3 ratio in all directions (not just between the two areas but also into the surrounding terrain)?

If you have a pc you can download DWG TrueView from the Autodesk website (www.autodesk.com) Click on the "DWG from Autodesk. The original" link and it will get you to the download page for TrueView. This is a viewer with dwg converter and it can convert AutoCAD files from release 14 up to 2009 back and forth into R14 or newer dwg files. During conversion you can also have it fix some minor errors in the dwg files. I don't recall right now if it also can convert to R12 and R13 files.

Frank, The user manual or the quickstart guide mentions that pad should not intersect another pad or a fence (talud) or you will get inaccurate results for the cut and fill. Fences can intersect each other without problems. (At least that is what the documentation says) Unfortunately I don't know if touching pads do count as intersecting pads or not. In your file, the pads are intersecting with fences, so that might explain the results. Maybe you could try creating a single fence for all pads together and see if that solves the problem. (Select all pads and then create the fence) I also noticed that your fences/taluds have a height. When I used the cut and fill the first time, I gave the talud the same Z value as the DTM modifier and the cut&fill values were approximately twice of what it should have been. One I recreated them and left the Z value of the taluds at zero, the results were much closer to the rough estimates. This could be another possible explanation for the doubling you got.