Data display bar...

[Kevin Ford]

When working with the data display bar and entering coordinates by hand, I find it extremely frustrating when I tab one too many places and have to tab all the way through again. Implementing shift-tab to reverse tab would be swell. Also, if you REALLY want to impress, implement a way of moving through the data display bar so I won't have to take my hand off the numeric keypad! Perhaps modify the right arrow, or allow the user to set a preference that toggles the enter key on the keypad to control the data display bar. I'd pay money for that option alone...

Kevin Ford

[skoorbb]

jan15, if rectangles were the solution, we could all still be using MiniCad 4 on a Wintel 286 or Mac Lisa platform.

How do you draw a rectangle at a 10d angle? insert a door or window? draw a cavity wall? Your method requires mulitple initial steps and continual editing, and fails to capitalize on the advancements in the VWA cad package, particulary wall types. And the relatively new space planning tools are pretty cool......

What about 3D? (future) smart wall section cuts?

Despite an unwieldy file structure and tools that no one uses, AutoCad has some superior basic 2D entry and editing tools, and those same tools are requested in this TB - trim/extend, xref, object selection, class/layer management, etc....No one wants a duplicate of AC, but the basics would be nice, and the VW inherent ease of use would not necessarily be sacrificed just because the 2D selection tool worked better.

You miss the point of your own post in another thread about the nature of the public forum herein, and the responsibility for progressive wish-listing.

[jan15]

But Bruce, I never said anything against the Wall tool, or against plug-in symbols, 3D CAD, or technological advancement in general. I spoke in favor of the Rectangle tool as opposed to the Line tool, and in conjunction with the particular task of laying out shapes and dimensions (which is the only task that this issue of coordinate entry affects significantly).

In earlier posts in this thread I said I wouldn't mind if L and A were the first coordinates for the Line and Wall tools, since I don't often use Lines to lay out geometry, and since when I use the Wall tool I'm usually snapping to constraint points on complex 2D shapes that I've already created by Adding and Clipping rectangles and then editing with the Reshape tool.

The reason for the latter is that when working in plan I normally design spaces rather than walls. I believe that's still common practice even in the most up-to-date architectural offices. And I leave those space-defining Polylines in the drawing even after Walls are placed, for area calculations if nothing else, but also usually for hatching or color fill to show flooring materials or functional relationships.

And spaces in buildings are overwhelmingly either rectangles or else complex shapes made up of rectangles, with an occaisional trapezoid here and there. That's the core of the argument for X and Y first. The built environment -- rooms, wall and roof surfaces, doors, windows, bricks, stair treads, switch plates, whatever -- is still made up primarily of things with edges at right angles to each other. It's nice to occaisionally have other angles as well, as much as we can afford them, in fact; but it's silly to alter the program to make a rarely-used task easier to perform than one that's used all the time.

And since the built environment is still in that primitive state, even after several generations of Star Trek, it would usually be faster even for you, and even if you start out by drawing walls rather than rooms, to specify their length by hitting Enter once for screen width or twice for screen height. The coordinate entry alone would suffice to define the wall's length. You wouldn't have to combine coordinate entry with mouse movement.

Also in this thread, I already answered your question about drawing rectangles at odd angles, i.e. by use of Constrain Angle (or by various other methods of rotating them after drawing, if there are only a few rectangles at the odd angle) or by setting Grid Angle (to draw a whole wing skewed at 10 degrees). These also are very quick methods; and they make layout even of skewed geometry faster with rectangles than with any method using lines and L coordinates.

[ 02-21-2003, 02:49 PM: Message edited by: jan15 ]