Drawing In Plan View - Page 2 - D-Tools Forum

Head Tool · 06-12-2007, 03:53 PM

Great, passionate discussions on a problem that is pretty much solved in SI5.

The main problem is that SI1-4 uses VBA to start up some stuff when a D-Tools template is opened. This is probably stepping on some of the wall code. In SI5 I think we got rid of all the VBA in the VST's.

Another issue in general it is bad practice to load down a Visio drawing with a bunch of non essential Visio shapes like walls, windows, doors etc. These are also complex shapes that take additional processing power and memory. it is MUCH better to import in an AutoCAD or WMF of the floor plan. Visio treats these as one shape, not potentially hundreds or thousands like you would get if you designed a house in Visio.

This is the process I recommend for both SI4 and 5 if you want to add a Visio based floor plan.

1: Create the floor plan in plain Visio.

2: Save as a WMF. This will give you a nice, clean, thin, single shape vector of the floor plan.

3: Open D-Tools SIx and use the insert picture command to drop the wmf file in the drawing. Since this is a vector file you can scale to any size you want.

You can also do the same thing in the DWG format.

This is really the best way to deal with floor plans in Visio.

I have enclosed a Visio drawing with a Visio drawing, the WMF version and the CAD version as well as the native dwg and wmf files.

I hope this helps.

TouchToBegin · 06-14-2007, 09:01 PM

Ok the saga continues. I have been moving forward with the particular project. While working in the Datamatrix in VISIO mode, I again lost functionallity of those wall features. I tried to do a work around by just creating a another plan page and copying all the shapes, including D-Tools shapes, and pasting them in the new page. The new page also did not have the special properties of the walls. However, when I went back to the original page, the walls had dimensions again and would snap/glue properly. I went back to the new page and it was working properly again.

So somehow it was lost, then found again.

Head Tool · 06-14-2007, 09:50 PM

Originally Posted by TouchToBegin

Ok the saga continues. I have been moving forward with the particular project. While working in the Datamatrix in VISIO mode, I again lost functionallity of those wall features. I tried to do a work around by just creating a another plan page and copying all the shapes, including D-Tools shapes, and pasting them in the new page. The new page also did not have the special properties of the walls. However, when I went back to the original page, the walls had dimensions again and would snap/glue properly. I went back to the new page and it was working properly again.

So somehow it was lost, then found again.

read this post Drawing In Plan View

TouchToBegin · 06-14-2007, 10:15 PM

Yes I understood your original post, but I'm sorry, its a little overboard to go back and forth making WMF files. I'm not building a whole house in Visio. It's a pretty simple floor plan and it's a bit rediculous to think that I have to deal with something like this. From a user point of view its a pretty simple operation that doesn't work. You're telling me its "pretty much solved" in SI5. Does that mean it might not be solved? All I'm doing by posting my results is letting other SI4 users know of a quicker way to solve the problem than what your post explained.

Head Tool · 06-14-2007, 10:31 PM

What that means is this seems to be somewhat of an obscure problem that and has not been run through our standardized testing procedure. Informal testing has shown that this is not an issue in SI5.

Also the main point of my post was to let you and anyone else who uses Visio that more Visio shapes = less performance and more potential problems.

I encourage anyone reading this post to NOT load your drawing down with a bunch of floor plan Visio shapes or any unnecessary shapes for that matter like large bit mapped files or complex grouped shapes. If you want to create a floor plan in Visio then create in native Visio, save as WMF and then drop in the background of a D-Tools Si project. The only extra steps are the save as and the import and you eliminate all the current and potential future problems.