Help using symbols

[Tom Mierau]

My employer has and uses Vectorworks. I have been asked to help with some matters.

I am aware of working with worksheets and have put a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet together that generates a table of logarithmitically generated diameters of circles. I can produce a comma-delimited file and import the file into a Vectorworks worksheet.

I want want to have Vectorworks treat these circles as Symbols and place an array of these symbols on a surface using the X/Y data and diameters taken from worksheet data I just imported... "Diameter", centers at location "X", and Location "Y"

Can anybody help me?

My sincere thanks in advance...

[MullinRJ]

Hi Tom,

Do a lot of the circles have the same diameter? If they are all unique, it will be better to just draw circles instead of place symbols.

If you choose to use Symbols, you will first need to create the symbols before you can place them. Since you are exporting from Excel, you can easily generate a VectorScript to do it for you.

For Circles w/o using symbols, format your data like this:

???ArcByCenter( Xcen , Ycen , Radius, #0, #360);

where "ArcByCenter(" , the two "," and ", #0, #360);" are text fields with your values of X, Y and Radius (shown in bold) in between.

Don't worry about the tabs that export between columns out of Excel as they are treated the same as spaces in VectorScript.

To define your symbols, do the same as above, but create the circles at (0, 0).

???BeginSym('Circle 1'); ArcByCenter(0, 0, Radius1, #0, #360); EndSym;

???BeginSym('Circle 2'); ArcByCenter(0, 0, Radius2, #0, #360); EndSym;

etc.

One circle for each unique diameter. Each one will need a unique name for referencing later. (Circle 1, etc.)

then place them with:

???Symbol('Circle 1', X, Y, #0);

???Symbol('Circle 1', X, Y, #0);

???Symbol('Circle 1', X, Y, #0);

etc

???Symbol('Circle 2', X, Y, #0);

???Symbol('Circle 2', X, Y, #0);

etc.

???Symbol('Circle 3', X, Y, #0);

etc.

When you have all of this assembled in Excel, copy it to a text file and save it. Then go to menu File > Import > Import VectorScript.. If you generate errors, correct the data and repeat.

Once you get this to work you will be able to mock up all kinds of patterns in Excel and have them drawn in VW very quickly.

HTH,

Raymond

[Tom Mierau]

Thanks a lot. As you might have guessed, I'm a bit of a "Techie" but I'm not the guy who works with Vectorworks. I'm going to go in and experiment with this today and see what I can do.

Circles? Thanks for mentioning about Vectorscript and sharing the syntax to 'draw' circles. All the circles are different size and this will help a lot. Vectorworks has a sort of 'Pascal' familiarity to me... I think I can do this.

Symbols? Astually there are some parts that ARE 'little drawings' and there are three sized of these. In Autocad, they would be called 'blocks'...

Your instructions regarding symbols will be a big help. One quick question regarding the symbols...

If I'm placing a group of these symbols (let's say Symbol-1), can I use a parameter to place the symbol at different degrees of rotation? Or, do I need a separate symbol for each angle of rotation I may require, even though they are the same size?

[MullinRJ]

Tom,

???The last field in the Symbol() command is the rotation field. Angle data is preceded with a "#".

e.g.:

???Symbol('Sym Name', X, Y, #30.2);?????{ rotates symbol 30.2? CCW }

And, yes, VectorScript is based on Pascal, about 95%. Also, Symbols can contain other symbol, as long as you don't have circular referencing.

You can also write your code as a typical program, with variables and calling routines, but if you already have your data in Excel, inline code works quickly and easily.

Welcome to the other side,

Raymond

PS - for a list of VS commands, download the following:

http://download2.nemetschek.net/nnapub/misc/2010/2010VectorScriptReference.zip

[Kool Aid]

Circles? Thanks for mentioning about Vectorscript and sharing the syntax to 'draw' circles. All the circles are different size and this will help a lot.

Forget symbols if they're all different size!

One of situations like this I've dealt with are street tree databases in Excel, Access, Oracle and what have you.

You just read the (tab-delim) data file and draw the circles accordingly. Possibly also attach a data format to store other data in the source file and you have a quite capable GIS-system.

EDIT

Even without? In a job long, long time ago I just mapped the diameters. MapInfo was not able to do that.

Edited January 7, 2010 by Kool Aid