pan and drawing area

[gp]

I found quite annoying to work near the margin of the virtual paper... Should be nice to have the selected paper in the center of the screen so would be possible to pan around without attaching more sheets of virtual paper on my drawings. Hope someone will understand what I mean.....

[pbacot]

yes.

old problem.

very annoying.

On some projects I set up a sheet in the middle of the drawing area. This requires that I select PowerCADD /print selection for every print. This in turn is made a little easier by using CopyCat.

Sort of related, or not, I was reminded today how the automatic pan speeds up when it hits empty space so suddenly you are shot far away from your drawing. And how the overview window includes all the empty space in your drawing instead of extents.

[Damon]

gp

I am TOTALLY with you on this issue. The way PCadd is tied to a paper sheet on the screen is primitive. When working near any of the margins, one often cannot pan without changing the amount of zoom/ magnification.

This issue also relates to the 'off page' objects. Again, this is the sort of issue that should have been addressed many versions ago. Why should I have to create a drawing area that is many pieces of paper in size just to get my drawing into the middle of the screen.

I've bitched about this before; sorry to bore you all with the repeat. But VectorWorks has PCadd solidly beat in this aspect.

And pbacot raises the zoom speed issue.

This clumsy, exasperating aspect of PCadd is also a mystery. Why so many programs can have a smooth, gradual scrolling capability while PCadd cannot, is a inexplicable. The ACAD users here just laugh, and laugh...

BTW, this is not just an issue with the Mighty Mouse. I've used other mice, including the Logitech MX revolution. The problem with the zoom behaviors must rest with our program.

Honestly, doesn't anybody else think these two issues are 'fatal flaws'?

I do.

[Nick]

It is very annoying.

[pbacot]

I didn't say zoom speed but Yes I would support a more gradual/ smooth zoom and one that centers on the cursor position.

[gp]

[gp]

[JohnMorse]

[gp]

[quote]Have you tried selecting "Full Page w/Margins" in the Size tab of the Drawing Setup dialog box? (P. 4-208 in the PCadd 7 manual)[quote]

Better, thanks! But what are the strange blue lines tha appear with some zooms? See the attachment.
Giulio

[Damon]

Johnmorse et al,

Yes, I have certainly done the 'full page w/ margins' option. The issue with the upper left location of the drawing is that the 'page' is that the flexibility and control the user has is really limited.

If you are working on a drawing, of a 24" x 36" sheet (or whatever size) and you have objects near the left or upper edges of the paper, it is not possible to pull/ pan that area into the centre of the screen without changing the level of zoom. Actually this is a problem near any of the drawing area edges.

Currently I am working on a set of layout/ materials/ grading drawings for a relatively complex project. My area of work is set over a much larger area covered by a survey drawing. What I have done is create a drawing that is three by four sheets in area. I have then dragged everything into the middle of this big sheet.

Why should I have to do this? Why can't I just have the sheet divorced from the drawing window?

If I get a survey drawing of a big area, and I am working on something that covers a part of that area, I want my subject site to be in the middle of my screen. That means that there is other information, perhaps survey data, or other projects, that really needs to be deleted. This is especially true if the overall area of imported data (thinking again of surveys) is bigger than the 200" x 200" drawing area limit.

I can see that changing the upper left drawing lock would be a programming nightmare, but it is archaic. I wish this bullet had been bitten (weird analogy) years and versions ago.

One partial help would be to make PCadd handle an unlimited work area. Then if one imported survey & cadastral data for a City, there would be less need to edit and destroy the base information.

[Alfred Scott]

Let’s be fair about this. What Damon is talking about is the idea that you can zoom in on a part of the drawing and that will be your new page size, maybe for a while at least. I know other programs have the ability to rotate a view of the drawing. While this is all an understandable thing to want, it is an extremely difficult thing to accomplish and might take several years. It’s a fundamental change and these are very difficult and involved.

There’s also the issue of design. Believe it or not, ES gets questions from new users like “tell me again how to draw a rectangle.” What we all love about PowerCADD is the elegant simplicity, and the elegantly simple solution is always the most difficult thing in any design. AutoCAD has something called View Ports, which I think may be this idea, but I don’t understand this stuff and often hear from people how awful it is.

I can, however, echo your frustration on the scroll wheel zooming. So let me tell you the history of this feature and what is involved.

Like almost all good ideas, this one comes entirely from other people and programs. I first heard of scroll wheel zooming from Clayton Hayes, and I think it was something he saw in AutoCAD. So I did this a long time ago, in PowerCADD 2000 I think, and I did it in the only way possible at the time, as a miscellaneous command and you had to program the mouse so it would send a fake key-press event to PowerCADD. I went out and bought a Microsoft Mouse, which I couldn’t stand, to get this working. And I did it in the way that seemed, at the time, as the logical approach. That is, I zoomed in and out by a factor of 2 with each movement of the mouse wheel, and you rolled the wheel forward to zoom in.

I’ve always maintained that the First Law of Macintosh Programming is that whatever you’re proud of today will embarrass you in a month. So I sat back, dumb, stupid and happy that I had done a great thing, and people loved it. In the development of PowerCADD 6, Todd Stanley and I worked together. The feature really belonged in PowerCADD, I sent him what I had done, Todd put it in PowerCADD, and I pulled my method out.

Then later I bought a Logitech wireless mouse, and I now use a MX Revolution which is easily the best mouse I ever used. Everyone said the Logitech mouse-driver software sucked, but as someone who writes software, I felt duty-bound to try it. It really does suck big time.

So I used USB Overdrive which everyone raved about. This is created by an Italian, Allesandro Levi Montalcini, and I’ll call him a genius for the accelerated scrolling feature he created (or maybe he stole the idea from someone else—good designers borrow, great designers steal). He describes the feature as taking one minute to get used to and two minutes to become addicted. I think that’s a perfect description.

The idea is that the faster you move the mouse wheel, the farther you scroll in the document. It’s exactly the same concept that Apple has used with the movement of the mouse, where faster movements of the mouse jump ahead farther. The standard mouse wheel scrolling is the same as tablet mode with the mouse—try that to see the difference!

When I began to use this mouse, I could see that the idea could be used in scroll wheel zooming in PowerCADD, and I also realized that it felt completely wrong to roll the mouse toward you to pull a page down and then have zooming work the opposite way. Sheesh, I got it backwards. The same action should pull the image in the drawing toward you. However other people feel the opposite about this, so this decision should obviously be left to the user, the way Google Earth and now PowerCADD handle it.

So two years ago, I implemented accelerated scroll wheel zooming in WildTools, and you can use it while in the process of drawing with any of the tools in WildTools.

There are two types of mouse wheel events in the Mac OS. The earlier devices, like the Microsoft Mouse simply report a single movement of the mouse wheel in a direction. When Apple introduced the Mighty Mouse, they created a new type of mouse wheel event, where the movement is reported as a change in the X and Y direction (‘delta y’ and ‘delta x’). This produced a smoother scrolling action and allowed for horizontal scrolling by rolling the ball to the left or right.

It was obvious to me from the very beginning that you could not use the delta y because USB Overdrive and other mouse drivers were exaggerating the amount. So I based the scroll wheel zooming on the time between the movements of the wheel, not the delta y. And this means that it works with the older Microsoft Mouse type of devices.

Contrary to what you might expect, the time between mouse wheel movements is not the smooth, infinitely variable amount you would expect. It’s rough and slightly unreliable. So I broke the zooming down to three speeds. Slow zooms by 1.25 and it’s what you are mainly doing when you scroll-zoom. It feels very smooth. Medium scrolls by 1.5 and fast by 2.0.

As a practical matter, zooming in and out by 1.25 feels smooth and gets rid of the jerky feeling we are now experiencing. I’ve tried lower numbers, and it’s just terrible. You just roll and roll and roll the wheel. Even though we all call it ‘accelerated scroll wheel zooming’, it is just a variable-speed method of operation. And 95% of the time when you’re using it in WildTools, you’re only using the slow/1.25 setting. The faster settings happen very quickly, and it’s over before you know it or have time to think about it.

I also did two other things. One is that the zoom is ‘gridded’ so that it will round off the zoom level to a sensible level, say 1.0, 1.25 or 1.5, rather than .9998, 1.1899 or 1.4888. And lastly I put a stop in it so it would not overshoot on zoom out and go beyond the Reduce to Fit view.

When accelerated scroll wheel zooming was put into PowerCADD last December, the job was assigned to an inexperienced and not particularly talented programmer (who has since moved on). He tried using the delta y approach, and this is why it simply does not work at all for most of us.

He also put in a slider control for the sensitivity of the acceleration. To this day I don’t know what this means, but I did put something in WildTools to do something sensible. Put the slider in the middle for the best action in WildTools.

The programmer who did this had a copy of my routines, and in a few minutes he could have just used it, and it would have worked. I certainly understand that everyone has their own programming style and since you have to maintain the programming, you want to do it in your own way.

Software development also requires that you give things priorities, so fixing crashes always has to take precedence over a nuance-feel issue. But this thing doesn’t work, and I’m hoping everyone can chime in to get this moved up the priority list.

[CJH]

If you program the mouse wheel to 'zoom in now' and 'zoom out now' the zoom will center on where the curser is in the drawing. USB Overdrive has not been updated in a long time and does not work with some buttons on newer mice, I have found that SteerMouse is now the best mouse driver as it recognizes all the buttons on the new Logitech mice.

[Alfred Scott]

Clayton,

Zoom In Now and Zoom Out Now zoom by a factor of 2, so this does not solve the problem and give you a smooth zooming action.

USB Overdrive has been updated and works fine with Leopard. I don't know about how it does with all the buttons on a Logitech Mouse. I use left-click, right-click and the scroll wheel. I love the feel of the mouse and that is is wireless. But I don't use the other buttons.

Alfred

[pbacot]

So why not make a scroll action again in WT that works and use that instead of the ES scroll?

[Alfred Scott]

Peter,

It does work in WildTools and has for the last two years. The problem is between tool use when the mouse is up.

If there were a mechanism available, I would use it, but there's a concept in programming called 'irresponsible hot-dogging' and there's no way I'm ever going to do such a thing.

Alfred