Report on Rotation

[willofmaine]

Is there a formula to report on the rotation of an object, such as a symbol? Having flipped a building, I want to make sure all my north arrow symbols are at 0 degrees instead of 180 degrees, for example.

Thanks

[Pat Stanford]

No way that I know of to return the rotation of an object in a worksheet.

If you return the height and width of the bounding box (=height, =width), they it should be fairly easy to look and see if there are any that are different.

I am not sure if this would help with flipped symbols or not.

[willofmaine]

Okay; thanks for the response. Unfortunately, at 180 degrees the width and height are the same as at 0 degrees...

[Pat Stanford]

Digging Deeper I just found another function in the worksheet

=isflipped

This will give you a 1 for flipped objects and a 0 for unflipped.

If you can create criteria to specify the objects you are interested in (by symbol name for instance) you can put in a column of isflipped. Then just right click (ctrl-click) on the row header to select and center on those objects so you can fix them.

[willofmaine]

Okay, that's something. Though it seems if you flip a symbol twice, once horizontally and once vertically, it returns "0" even though the angle is -180?.

It seems like angle of rotation would be a pretty basic bit of information to be able to collect and even modify.

I didn't follow that last bit about "right-click on the row header to select and center on those objects so you can fix them." Oh, wait, "row header" being at the far left where "Select Data Items" is an option. Okay. So there's no way to change the flipped status from the worksheet itself. I guess I'm thinking of record fields...

Is VectorScript something that could be used to do this? Or is it too limited to the available options such "=isflipped"?

Anyway, thanks for digging deeper...

[Pat Stanford]

Yes, I do believe you can do it with Vectorscript.

The question becomes how you want it to work. Perhaps the easiest way would be to create a custom record format and have a Vectorscript store the rotation of objects there. You could then use the regular worksheet tools to display that data and find the objects you need to fix.

Or you could select an object that is correct and then have the script select all of the same symbols that don't have the same rotation.

Or ...

What are you really trying to accomplish and what would work best for your workflow?

[willofmaine]

I'd kind of lost track of what I was originally trying to do. It just seems it should be possible to report on the rotation of objects; really anything in the OIP.

Originally I'd made a symbol out of the North Arrow PIO. This project involves a series of symmetrically opposite buildings, which we keep flipping to create the next one. Unfortunately the "N" of the North Arrow when flipped is backwards. I wanted to make sure all the North Arrow symbols were correct (depending on the building, sometimes the North Arrows get flipped both horizontally and vertically). This afternoon I just realized the 'obvious' solution is to simply draw my North Arrow (just the circle and the heavy line!) and use Text for the "N," which of course corrects itself when flipped.

In all cases I'm thinking I might like to look into VectorSripting...

In the meantime... any way to do a worksheet report on all the Text in a file?? I figured out that "=callout.text" works for Callouts. But I can't seem to list all the text... (I don't want to just find and replace "Tack Board"... I want to know where all of its instances are so that I can re-adjust them on their sheets once updated with a much longer note...)

Thanks!!

[Pat Stanford]

I know of no way to get a sting of text to be pulled into a worksheet cell.

The closest I can think of would be to use VS to copy the text into a record field that is attached to the text object.

If you need help with the VS just ask.

[willofmaine]

Or you could make a symbol out of the text and link its text to a record that has the desired text. But hopefully 2011 will be able to read 2008 files and instead I can use the Callouts with the new leader-less option...

Regarding VS, once I'm beyond my current deadline hopefully I'll find some time to start looking into that. I'm sure I will have questions, so ask I will. Thanks!