VW (PC) TO MINICAD6 (MAC)

[terrain]

I just purchased VW to do some work for a client who is running MiniCad6 on Mac. I'm anticipating a lot of conversion problems both in saving to an earlier version and platform problems (fonts?). I know the easy answer is to get the firm to update their software (will work on that) but in the interim I would appreciate hearing of any work-a-rounds or problems people have experienced. Also any words of advice for an acad user jumping into vw

thanks

john

TERRAIN E.D.S.

[Guest]

Fonts can certainly be an issue when using MiniCAD/VectorWorks (or any application, really) on different platforms. Best advice here seems to be to avoid getting too fancy, and try to use fonts which are available on both platforms from the same publisher. There are, for example, lots of different versions of Helvetica from lots of different sources; if you can make sure that you're both using the same version from the same publisher, you should be able to avoid problems with different font metrics, etc.

VectorWorks 8.5.2 (and previous versions, of course) can save directly to MiniCAD 6 format, so you don't have to mess with any other products to accomplish the translation. Obviously, though, you'll lose some information in the process. Plug-in objects, for example, ought to convert to MiniCAD 6 just fine, but they'll be translated into objects that MiniCAD 6 can understand (because MiniCAD doesn't know anything about PIO's). If you get the file back from the client and try to translate it back to VectorWorks, it should also work fine, but there won't be enough information in the file to reconstruct the PIO's -- they'll just be regular objects.