#Aegis Draw Problems
12 messages in this thread
I've used DrawPlus a fair amount for piping plans and a few pre-rearrange
the living room drawings. Go ahead and describe your difficulties a bit
more and I'll give it a go.
Thanks. Well, it seems when I use the "drag it" tool to move something
just a pinch, the program draws the object in a different place than the
shadow'ed outline says it'll do. I was trying to arrange an equipment rack
layout, and it was maddening…. each time the result was different, but
never right. Sometimes it wouldn't move the object at all. The other
problem – I've found, through experimenting, that if I try to send a
drawing to my plotter directly, parts of the drawing will fall off the edge
of the earth, and the plotter will freak. But if I plot to the
DRAWPLOTDUMP file, then type > par: the file to the plotter thru the CLI,
it works just fine. A timing error or something? The plotter is using the
Centronics parallel interface. The plotter's self-test works fine. I
dunno. Thanks for any help you can offer. -joanne
Sounds like you have grid snap turned on. Toggle it off and you should be
able to put objects down where ever you want to.
Can't help with the plotter. I haven't used one with Draw2000 yet. I've
been sketching vector graphics for a digital scope at work and output
through a custom plotter driver to disk which is compiled into instructions
for the vector display processor. Sure beats sketching them out on paper.
The only output problems I've had is trying to dump to a dot matrix
printer. Guru's every time, but it's something about the way my system is
set up that's causing that. It worked fine on another system. Peter_S
(LeCroy Corp)
Sounds like you have a nifty system. Sorry I forgot to mention it, but
grid snap WAS off. I also found some problems with grid snap, but that's
another story. On your printer Guru'ing, do you perhaps have the new prefs
printer drivers mixed with the old printer.device? I seem to recall
getting Gurus in Dpaint until I caught that….
If grid snap was off, I can't imagine what was happening. You know how it
is, though; if one of us could SEE it, we'd probably go "AH…" and tell
you what's up. Doing it "verbally" like this makes it tricky until
something "clicks" for one of us. Do keep us up to date.
Regarding problems, there are a lot of sneaky problems hiding in Draw and
Draw Plus. For example, you can select "Part" from the menu and it will
work fine, but if you select "Part" from the keyboard combination, Draw
will insist "Part Not Found". Until you learn to work around the problems
and limitations, it can be really frustrating. (In all fairness, once you
learn how to do that, it's a reasonably powerful package that does probably
95% of what 95% of us need.)
Yeah, I know what you mean…. you really have to see it for yourself to
have it 'click.' If I find any more outstanding clues, I'll let you know.
Thanks for the help.
Peter sounds to be bang on with his comments about grid snap. For
something like an equipment rack where you want fairly exact placement,
just turning off grid snap may be even more frustrating, though!
A couple of things you might try. Zoom way in on a corner of the object
you want to place and try it there. As you zoom in, Draw resizes the grid
so that you still have a reasonable resolution; this means you'll be able
to get closer than you could before.
If you prefer to work with grid snap off, try turning data snap on. This
snaps you to the nearest data point. For example, if you wanted to place
two boxes side by side, you would grab the corner of one box and deposit it
near the corner of the other box. Draw will take the data point which
represents the corner of your box, and will align it exactly with the
nearest data point it can find: the corner of the other box.
Also, turn your grid on if it isn't; this may help you visualize exactly
what's going on when things aren't placed where you think they should be.
Well, I zoomed in as close as I could to place the objects (I've been here
before) when I encountered the problem. I'll give data snap a try…
thanks!
Re the Plotter….what mfr and model? Secondly…was the object being
'dragged' a part? If so, is it the same scale as the drawing format? If
so, is grid lock on or free? We'll get this figured out….you betcha!
The object was a rectangle containing a text label within, grouped as a
part. I was attempting to line it up in a drawing of a vertical rack. Same
scale for everything, grid & data snap off. I haven't tried data snap on
yet, but grid snap caused 'overshoots' at times.
The plotter is a Comrex Comscriber II (really made by someone else… it
uses Roland DXY 800/101 codes) though I haven't been able to track down
anyone who admits to making it… I've even called Japan! The plotter is a
4-pen flatbed, 11×17, parallel input. It also uses an unusual pen holder,
an adapter which resembles an HP pen but with two flanges instead of one.
The adaptor holds a Pentel Ceramicron refill pen, which is only available
for paper media (another problem, as I'd like to plot on acetate
sometimes).
Excuse me for jumping into the thread, but I dl'd a shareware cad program
which says it can save files in DrawPlus format, and that this is
compatible with a number of other programs. Does the DrawPlus format have
another name (for example, is it HPGL, or AutoCad ????) As you can tell
from my question, I am a complete novice re cad programs.
I don't think DrawPlus's internal format is anything but proprietary (but
that only means I haven't heard otherwise!) If you need a standard format
— for exporting, perhaps — you can get HPGL by playing a little trick.
When you select PLOT, DP creates a drawing file which it then spools to the
plotter (I believe the name is DrawPlotDump). If you will take your printer
OFF LINE (because DP uses the printer.device for plotter output) and then
request a plot, it will create the file, then try to write to the printer,
throwing up a requester. Cancel the requester and you have an HPGL file
just waiting to be used! (Of course you can't import in this manner.) If
you're willing to do some work, you can also build a specification file
which causes DP to "plot" in any format you need… so you could
conceivably create an AutoCAD file directly. But it'd take quite a bit of
setup the first time.