Drawing In Plan View - D-Tools Forum

TouchToBegin · 06-11-2007, 04:53 AM

I am having to draw a floor plan from scratch to illustrate equipment locations in the proposal. I can start a new drawing and use the 'building plan' stencil setup with Visio. Its easy to draw this way since the walls will scale and show dimmensions as they scale. Windows and doors snap onto the walls, its great. I can't use the same stencils in D-Tools with the same results. Is there a way to do this? Also, the drawing made for the plan layout is the same Architectural scale as the D-Tools plan, yet when i copy the whole plan and paste onto the D-Tools plan tab, the scale is different and doesnt fit on the page correctly. I can grab the whole group of objects and scale it down, but then the windows and doors do not remain snapped in the correct places.

Is there a way to do this within the D-Tools drawing?

Head Tool · 06-11-2007, 04:10 PM

I just checked to make sure and you can open a standard Visio Stencil in SI5, I can't test SI4 at the moment but it should work as well. Open a project in SI, go to File>>Shapes>>Building Plan>>Walls, Shell Structure (or whatever) and design away.

TouchToBegin · 06-11-2007, 08:18 PM

Its not that I can't use the shapes, but the behavior on the page is different.
If I open Visio without D-Tools, or even if I just start a new drawing from the D-Tools owned app, the shapes have some behaviors about them that the D-Tools templates do not support I think.

Start a new drawing, add the Wall, Shell Structure stencil. Drop in a wall.
You'll see the the wall is dimmensioned in relation to the drawing scale of the page properties. When you alter the size, the dimmension changes too. When you add a window or a door, it snaps perfectly to the wall. I need this enabled badly in SI. Even if I draw it out on another drawing, it doesn't past right into the SI template. There is something smart about these objects and some setting on the SI template is making them dumb.

Head Tool · 06-11-2007, 09:38 PM

Don't know what the problem is on your end. I just tried again and the floor stencil plan stencil works as expected within SI5. Part of the problem could be the SI4 templates. We did change the templates a bit in SI5. If you are on SA I think you can get a pre release of SI5 here http://www.d-tools.com/DToolsHome/D-...e_release.html

Is the enclosed screen shot what you are expecting?

TouchToBegin · 06-11-2007, 11:55 PM

I'm glad it works in SI5.but what good does that do me today? I bought SI5 pro. but since the beta does include all the add-ons, I'm stuck working in SI4. Surely being the head tool allows you, or one of you employees to check this out on a machine running SI4? If there is something wrong with my setup, the only way for me to know is if you test the same setup.

TouchToBegin · 06-12-2007, 02:20 AM

So it works in my SI5 as well. Are there any tricks to getting that to work in SI4?

**Kevin Mikelonis** · 06-12-2007, 06:52 AM

Originally Posted by TouchToBegin

...check this out on a machine running SI4

Easy Mate..

I have SI4 running on 2 machines along side SI5 pre-release.

I have done all the things you outlined you cannot do and everything works fine in SI4 using the D-Tools 24 x 36 template.

Dropped in walls with dimensions, added a door, rescaled page, changed drawing measurement units.

Running Visio 2007 with SI4 all is well.

I have read your post a few times and really not sure what the problem or behaviors you are looking for which are not there.

TouchToBegin · 06-12-2007, 01:07 PM

I'll check the 24 x 36 template today and report back. It's not working on my 11 x 17 template.

TouchToBegin · 06-12-2007, 01:26 PM

I started a new drawing with the 24 x 36 template. No problem.

I started a new drawing with the 11 x 17 template, now no problem.
I went back the the project that started this thread and it was simply not working on the 11x17 template. I blew away the Visio drawing from the project folder and started a new 11 x 17 and it worked.

Something along the way turned that feature off on that particular drawing.
I don't know Visio well enough to even begin to know what that could have been. Any ideas there?

TouchToBegin · 06-12-2007, 01:30 PM

Originally Posted by Kevin Mikelonis

Easy Mate..

I'd like to take it easy, but it seem as if the answer I was getting was not to worry because it will work in the next version.

But thanks to all cause its working now...