Editing VW plug-ins

[MikeB]

I am trying to edit the simple door plug-in that came with VW. I have made a copy of it and renamed it by using the create plug-in command. When I select the copy of the plug-in and select "script" I get a message that the script is larger than 32K and cannot be displayed. Am I doing something wrong or is it impossible to edit this Plug-In? I know its not write protected because I've seen Plug-ins that are and they tell you you cannot edit them when you try.

What I want to try to do is to edit the script so it displays a door # with the door object. and you can change the # in the info pallett. I have written some simple plug-ins for Wall types and window types so I just wanted to try and do something a little more complex.

thanks

[Guest]

The Macintosh version of the plug-in editor uses MacOS's built-in text editing system, TextEdit. TextEdit has had a 32K size limit since the dawn of Macintosh, and therefore so does the plug-in editor. We're certainly aware of the limitation and looking into solutions.

The best (possibly only) way to edit existing plug-ins that exceed the 32K limit is to edit them with the Windows version of VectorWorks. The Windows version also has a size limit, but it's something like 60K or 64K, depending on the version of Windows you use.

Mac users writing their own plug-ins need not be constrained by the 32K limit imposed by the editor, however. Starting with VectorWorks 8.5, VectorScript supports an $INCLUDE directive that lets you insert the contents of a text file into your scripts. You can write:

{$INCLUDE filename}

to include a file in your script. There's more information on page OL-VS-43 of the VectorScript documentation.

Hope that helps...

Caleb Strockbine

caleb@diehlgraphsoft.com