glennw

Use Craftsman type in a Fixed window with 1 light across and 3 lights vertical. Or, if you want the choice of top third or bottom third (or anywhere really), use a Single Hung window and use the Bottom Component Size setting to place the muntin. Or, you can always use Custom Muntins.

Ahha, Thanks Scott, that clears it up a bit. I could sort of see a relationship between the correct dimension and the displayed dimension being scientific notation, but i wasn't aware of that incarnation of scientific notation - it's been a long time since I was at school! A variation on Scientific notation called Scientific E Notation. A sort of "shorthand" scientific notation. We'll see what tech support has to say as to why it is happening.

Scott, It doesn't look like scientific notation to me. Scientific notation is expresses as a number (less than 10) x 10 to the power of a number (superscript a - the number of places you move the decimal point to get the number to be less than 10) Its a weird one because it doesn't seem to save with the plan. It is more system specific than plan specific. Chop, If I reboot Chief and open the same plan, the problem is gone. So not a custom unit as far as I can figure. I have sent it in to tech support.

Has anyone seen this sort of thing happening to all numerical values - including those in all the dbx's?

Mark, That doesn't really fix the problem though. That will make things look OK, but when you use the join roof planes tool, the roofs revert back to how they were. You play around more and find out exactly what is wrong. Or you could just do the above and move on.

Mark, Grab the Baselines for the 2 truncated front hips and move them just a little towards the house - I just used 1 click of the left arrow button. That seemed to fix all the problems.

I think you will find that Chief will do an auto rebuild when it opens the plan.

Just to clarify: Select the object, click the copy/past button, on the edit toolbar, select Reflect About Object, click on the line you want to reflect about. Done.

Because it doesn't appear that the grooves go into the window/door recesses, I would start by trying to use molding poly lines with multiple moldings applied. The molding would be the height and thickness of the grooves, same material as wall and drawn on the outside of the wall. I think they will be easier to control than Material Regions. Here is a really quick one.

Depending on what you want the shadows for, you can always do a Top View of a Vector View, Technical Illustration, etc. This gives you shadows, but it is not a plan view "drawing" - it is a "plan view 3D view".

Sherry, It is your snap distance that controls the snapping to the wall centre. Turn off you grid snaps. In Preferences...Edit...Snap Properties...Options...Snap Distance - change this to something like 5 and see what happens. I think this will depend on your screen resolution and your zoom level. Have a play with the setting as see what works best for you. Is it presently set to 20? - I don't know what the OOB setting is.

Jonathan, You can do this with one molding poly line. The corners can sometimes get a but screwed because of the fixed spacing of the pickets. All you need to do is draw your deck with only the posts and no railing. You can then draw the poly line and the complete rail will build with toprails, pickets, etc. I forgot to chamfer the bottom of the pickets, but you can get the idea. The moldings look like this:

Defaults...CAD...General Cad...Display Line Angle As...Quadrant Bearing.

Chopsaw, Can you post a plan that demonstrates this behaviour - I can't duplicate it.

Or..if you are talking about something different.... Open the dimensions dbx...Segments panel...check the appropriate segment and the Blank Segment. The beauty of this method is that it maintains the integrity of the dimension line while it appears that the dimension line is broken. Or...delete the whole dimension line and draw shorter individual ones.

In a Cross Section/Elevation view, select the line tool and use a Midpoint snap to find the center of the roof plane.

Just to clarify what Eric said. This only works if the default is being used and none of the room heights have been changed manually from the defaults.

Bill, You can do that easily using a rectangle. In your plan view, use Zoom and drag a rectangle around the area you want to send to layout. Send To Layout and select Current Screen. I can't see how using any polygon shape would work as the layout box is restricted to a rectangle

Chop, No. The 51/2" dimensions are not showing, but the extension lines are. Like the top dimension here:

Chop, I don't think that is it. I probably didn't express the problem properly. She is getting the extension lines to both sides of the exterior walls. But, she isn't getting the dimension text for the external wall thickness. Its the same as having a Blank Segment.

I have a new user who is generating auto exterior dimensions. They are defaulting to Suppress Wall Widths for the exterior walls. I know I can manually open an existing dimension line and check the above. I know I can check Ignore Interior Walls in the Auto Exterior Dimension Defaults. Does anyone know if there is a default for this setting. Every time I do an Auto Exterior Dimension, the exterior wall widths are displayed. Every time she does an Auto Exterior Dimension the exterior wall widths are not displayed. Any ideas?

You don't even have to do the math to work it out. Draw a simple section view with cad and let Chief do the math. Your roof angles are 7.683982 and 4.628138

Michael, Don't forget there is one proviso in relation to the above. The double click to get to the active default dbx for that tool is conditional upon "Edit Active Default on Double Click" being toggled on in Preferences. If that is toggled off, a double click will open the Saved...Defaults dbx instead of the active default dbx for that tool. I am not sure what is the OOB state for that toggle.

....and note my observation in the other thread that the larger the terrain, the worse the shadows get.

Mick, By default, the soffit will build through wall layers outside of the main layer, ie, the soffit will build to the main layer. "The Build Platform to Exterior of Layer" will also determine if external wall layers will stop at the soffit or continue past the soffit up to the top of the wall. Have a play with those two settings with your particular wall definition.