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REASONS TO UPGRADE TO 9.5?


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I am new to VectorWorks and to my present company.We have version 8.5.1. I would like to upgrade to 9.5 for the better capabilities, but since I am new to VectorWorks, I am not sure what those better capabilities might be. Basically, I am making a list of reasons why we need to upgrade and I would like to get some feedback from you old hats.

Thanks!

Gustaf

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Gustaf, You should contact the local seller of VW in your area. If you are in the USA, contact our Sales Team at 1888-646-4223. If you are not in the USA, please refer to our Sales webpage for information on your local distirbutor.

The sales teams should be able to discuss the added features and explain to you the differences between our IP product line.

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Here's a few off the top of my head

-Higher precisionWe used to have a problem with objects becoming slightly out of scale. For instance a 4' x 4' square would become 3' 11.99999". It was fairly random and had to do with the internal accuracy of the program. Now that accuracy is higher and the problem has gone away

-The origion is seperate from the printable areaWe had another problem where if we moved the printable area of a drawing, all of our work group referecnces would become mis aligned with the contents of the drawing, this has also been fixed in 9.5.2

-NurbsAt first these seemed like a luxury, but I reciently did a 3-D model of a church addition that has a sloping sight with sidewalks, curbs and streets. By using nurbs, and the extrude along path command I was easily able to make these landscape elements follow each other perfectly. Nurbs have now become essential for me in creating architectural visualizations.

Those are the big three, I'll think about it and post more as they come to me.

Good Luck

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i looked at 9.5 recently + have decided to stay with 8.5.2

While <on a pc at least> its interface is slicker + there are some nice tweaks <improved nudge + better shortcut key combos, much better DXF/DWG handling> there does not seem to be a compelling reason <to me> to upgrade.i would love some of the new tools i see at vector depot for v9, but IMHO the cost doesn't seem worth it

gideon wink.gif" border="0

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I'm still drawing with 8.5 even though I bought the upgrade to 9. But the upgrade only cost me $200, and I think it was well worth the price for other reasons. There's a higher level of precision and therefore better printing and exporting results in 9.5, as others have pointed out, and 9.5 can read and write AutoCad 2000 files, and it has a print scaling feature that does reduced/enlarged printing. So for me it's worth it to have 9.5 just for printing and importing/exporting. (But note that printing in 9.5 can actually be glitchier than in 8.5 if you don't check the 2 new boxes at the bottom of the "Print" window.) And I often convert a finished file to v9 and email that to people instead of a DWG file, so they can read it or print it as it should look, not as it looks with the limitations of AutoCad. The free Vector Works Viewer is intentionally hobbled so that it only reads v9 files. The availability of the Viewer is one of the best reasons to buy the upgrade to version 9.

The reason why I don't draw with 9.5 is that speed is important to me, and most of the version 9 changes in drawing tools and commands result in slowing down the drawing process. For example:

-- They eliminated the Extend tool. VectorWorks, with all of its other tricks, doesn't need this tool as much as AutoCad does, but there are many cases where Extend saves a lot of time over any other approach. -- They made the interface to the Nudge feature even slower. It had a poor interface in version 8, but I was able to revise that with a macro handler so that it actually worked pretty well. In version 9, it's more cumbersome to use, requiring either contortions or two-hand operation, and it's also more difficult to fix.

-- They messed up the automatic-pan-while-dragging feature. This used to kick in anytime you dragged off the screen, but now it only works when you drag to a very precise location near the edge of (but still ON) the screen. This makes it slower and very frustrating to use.

On the plus side:

++ 9.5 doesn't grey out the drawing window when you use the Attributes or Object Info palette, so there's no longer that annoying business of having to click somewhere on the drawing window before you're back in the drawing again and can stretch things or change tools.

++ The Trim tool actually works in 9.5, which it rarely did in previous versions, so much so that I learned to live without it, and now I would have to re-train myself to use it again.

++ The bug (perhaps Windows 98 only) that sometimes made version 8 refuse to pull down the list of hatch patterns in a file with more than 30 hatch patterns doesn't seem to affect 9.5.

++ VectorWorks is still much easier to use and much more conducive to producing good readable drawings than AutoCad. I say that after 7 years on AutoCad and 4 on VectorWorks.

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