LevisL

The only advice I have is make sure you use a font that is available in both platforms.

Ah, yes. Sorry for guiding you down the wrong path. Change your CAD text style, or as Mike said, whichever text style is associated with the layer the pline is on.

right here...

Bluebeam PDF and Adobe Acrobat both have a similar feature to what Joe uses. I use it all the time on Bluebeam. I tried Perry's method of putting text on page 0, but if you want to see through it like a true watermark, you have to put it on the back group (drawing order), but then any objects with a solid fill are above it and it doesn't look right. Until Chief gives us control over text opacity, it'll have to be a job for another program.

Here are a couple options to expand on Scott's method. All super quick to do. A couple things to note: 1. You can get a single header over the 3 doorways by mulling them together. While that works for the framing, you lose the flooring inside the doorways in the camera views, so take your pick! Come on Chief... fix this! 2. For the single wall with 2 framing layers, unfortunately Chief only recognizes one of them when building the framing. Again, please fix this Chief!!!

I started doing the same thing with Dropbox a few months ago. I save all my plans in the Dropbox folder. Plus, I moved my entire X6 data folder in there too. So now all my plans, libraries and autosaves/backups are shared between machines. It's been working without a hitch so far. I plan on keeping my plans in the Dropbox folder for a year, then removing them to an archive folder on the desktop so that the Dropbox folder stays at a manageable size.

You have to change it by modifying the text style for door labels.

Aha... I just learned something today! I needed to click 'Add to Library As' (the blue icon), not 'Add to Library' (yellow icon).

How did you take one of the doors from the plan and add it to your library? I tried just selecting the door and clicking 'add to library', but that adds the door WITH THE FRAME, not just the door slab. Then you can't open it to edit it in the library, say to add a stretch plane. On a side note, my door symbol seems to be getting wilder every day! I originally set it to have 'Color - White' as the main color, 'Color - Black' for the window frames, and 'Glass Standard' for the windows. For a while, the window frames would change to 'Foam insulating block' and the windows to 'black'. Then the main color went to black. Yesterday, the door was some sort of burnt orange and the window frames beige vinyl siding! Now this today...

Before I switched over to macs, I used Bluebeam. I still use it via Parallels. Hoping they'll come out with a mac version soon! It's very similar to Acrobat in many ways, but a bit cheaper. A few of the many features I like about it are: - You can markup plans and take measurements of exisiting plans - You can add 'stamps' to a pdf (I use this to add a watermark to my plans to e-mail to clients for review) - You can combine files, extract pages from a file, add/delete/rearrange pages, etc. I tried a few freeware programs before I settled on Bluebeam, but like Michael said, a lot of them come with "baggage", or the freeware version has limited features. To me, Bluebeam was well worth the price.

Michael, I'm having similar issues with changing materials on a custom garage door symbol I created little while back. No matter how many times I open up the library symbol and re-assign the correct materials, they never seem to stick. Once I stick it in a plan, it's good, but for whatever reason, it's always messed up in the Library. Must be a bug.

You could also draw a cad line/arc/spline (whichever you prefer) manually and put in on the electrical connections layer. Then you could connect the opener directly to the switch, because in reality, it's not the ceiling outlet that's wired to the switch.

I had a similar issue a while back with pony walls and step footings. It was in X5, but I seen glimpses of the same issue in X6. I eventually figured out a way around it, but it was definitely a pain in the a**! If I remember correctly, I had to take a different (read backwards) approach to the stepped footings. Normally, I would have my regular footing elevation and step DOWN as required by the grading. Instead, I believe what worked was starting from the LOWEST footing elevation and stepping UP from there. It's definitely not the ideal way of doing things and takes a bit more calculating to figure things out. This was my footing mess...

I run into a similar issue editing fills in wall definitions from time to time. I click on the dropdown list but I can't select any pattern. Usually, when this happens, Chief crashes on me shortly after. And of course, it happens when I'm really busy and don't have time to report it! Happened a couple weeks ago, but nothing since.

Relocated here

Same here. Performance has been quite good on my machine. I had some of these same issues, minus the crashing when printing pdf, but overall, I'm quite happy with it so far. Much better than running CA via bootcamp like I used to do!

I think it might be something with your particular machine. I find it works quite well on my iMac. I get the odd hang-up here and there and a bit of lag in regenerating the 3D model (only a few seconds), but overall I find it performs quite well. I'm happy with it so far...