Copying between drawings

[AdamParboosingh]

Hello all,

Been working in VW 2013 for a couple of weeks now. And I haven't seen this issue before with other versions but I might be wrong.

It seems every time I copy a simple 2D drawing (polygons, lines, circles...) into a 2nd drawing, the pasted copy lines become separated. Often, the lines are in the same X or Y coordinates so it's simple to 'put' back together.

Just did a little experiment to see if it has to do with 'Screen Plane' or 'Screen Aligned' but this didn't effect it. I haven't ventured into knowing the differences but I will soon.

There must be something I'm not doing right.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Adam Parboosingh

Augustana College, Rock Island, IL

Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts, Scenography

www.adamparboosingh.com

[Benson Shaw]

Please explain more. or post a couple example files (switch to Full Reply and use the File Manager)

. . . lines become separated

. . . lines are in the same X or Y coordinates so it's simple to 'put' back together.

Do you mean they decompose? For example that a polygon becomes several discrete lines, one for each segment, rather than a single object?

Or do you mean that objects move relative to each other?

Or that the whole selection pastes to a different location relative to the drawing origin? (Paste in Place works in my tests)

None of these problems occur if I create two new blank files in v2013 and paste objects from one file to the other.

OK, give some more info to see if we can find what's happening in your drawings.

-B

[AdamParboosingh]

Do you mean they decompose? For example that a polygon becomes several discrete lines, one for each segment, rather than a single object?

Or do you mean that objects move relative to each other?

Or that the whole selection pastes to a different location relative to the drawing origin? (Paste in Place works in my tests)

None of these problems occur if I create two new blank files in v2013 and paste objects from one file to the other.

OK, give some more info to see if we can find what's happening in your drawings.

-B

Thanks for the reply.

No. The polygons don't decompose but will change their position in relation to each other.

I didn't think about using paste in place which solves this problem.

I've attached a couple of jpgs of issue. The 'original' is the drawing I'm looking to copy into a new file. The second jpg is of the pasted drawing; the left is just 'pasting' in elements and the right is 'paste in paste'.

As you can see, there are some lines/2D polygon has lost it's relation to the original. [img:right][/img]

I'm just glad the simple paste in place function helps with this.

Thanks,

Adam

[Kevin McAllister]

Hi Adam,

Are the layer you're copying from (original file) and the layer you're copying to (new file) in the same scale?

The result feels a lot like when you try and resize a group containing things that don't scale (ie. symbols) by dragging a corner handle.....

Kevin

[Benson Shaw]

I wonder if the two drawings have a different view, different plane settings, and/or some of the objects are screen plane and some are layer plane. This would not matter if the objects were all screen or all layer or if both drawings were set to layer plane or both to screen plane.

Match up the plane settings in the two drawings.

Check the objects - that dashed/hooked line for instance which ends up below the main bunch. In the OIP, is that set to Screen Plane while everything else is set to Layer or Working Plane?

Or, maybe it's something else.

-B

Edited February 26, 2013 by Benson Shaw

[bcd]

A couple of points come to mind - echoing some of the above responses:

Group - if you group the object in the original file they should copy/paste as expected.

Symbol - if this is something you do regularly perhaps you should Create a Symbol of the lines

Layer/Screen plane - Be sure all lines & polygons are living in the same plane.

Layer import - perhaps less relevant in this case, but when transferring objects from one file to another a useful way is Create New Layer>Import Layer, browse to the source file, select the relevant Layer and check Import Objects

Compose - I find that unless there's a good reason not to - to draw with polygons as much as possible. Selecting a Line, Edit>Select Connected Objects, Modify>Compose can be very useful. (so for instance, in your drawing above there would be 2 lines- the horizontal dashed lines - and everything else would be polygons)

hth

[AdamParboosingh]

Hi Kevin,

Yes. The two drawings are in the same scale.

How's Vancouver these days?

_________

I want to say that Benson most likely got it right. There was something odd about the screen plane from the original drawing and the copy.

Will need to look at this for future drawings.

Thanks all.

Adam