BenMerritt

For splines, you can do this with the "New Segment Angle" option: I suspect that I may know what's causing the slowdown in this case, although I can't confirm that with certainty at the moment. You may be able to work around the issue by marquee-selecting the spline instead of doing a single click. If you do end up submitting this to tech support, feel free to suggest that they send it my way so I can at least make some notes on it; that may make it easier for us to triage the issue.

There might be nothing wrong with what you're doing to import the PDF. On Macs with Retina displays, we've found that PDFs will sometimes be drawn at the wrong resolution, and this may be what you're seeing here. You might find that running Chief on a non-Retina display helps, if you have one available.

By design, the ceiling plane will extend across room divider walls when the rooms on both sides have the same ceiling height. This can be rather confusing behavior at times, especially for recessed trey ceilings, but without that behavior, it would be more difficult to produce trey ceilings that intentionally span room dividers. One way to deal with these cases is, as Eric suggested, to draw a regular interior wall and add a doorway that covers the entire wall surface. Given the configuration of the walls in this plan, though, it's probably easier to use the "Explode Trey Ceiling" tool and then pull the edge of the ceiling plane back so it doesn't extend into the kitchen area. Of course, then you'd probably want to put that ceiling plane on a layer that's hidden in the plan view so it's not cluttering the drawing. Neither of those is really a perfect solution, of course, but hopefully it'll get you into a state where the plan at least looks the way you'd like it to.

If you have any suggestions on what you'd like to see improved with it, I'd be happy to hear them. The diagram in its current form wasn't really designed to be a true "preview"; it's currently only useful as a rough guide to the meanings of the various height controls, which makes its value pretty limited for experienced users.

I haven't looked very closely, but the issues with the images in the most recent comparison look to me like JPEG compression artifacts, which have nothing to do with the ray-trace itself. If the screenshots were compressed as PNG (or as JPEG with a higher quality factor), they'd probably look better. (Of course, then they might be large enough that they would exceed the limit on the file size of attachments.) Then again, I'm working using a remote desktop tool, so everything on my screen looks it has JPEG compression artifacts...

It's also possible to leverage the unit system to handle the conversion for you, which is useful when you don't want to look up conversion constants: area.convert_to("sq m").round(2)

This behavior (at least when the rooms on either side of the divider have the same ceiling height) is actually intentional; it tries to "flood fill" the largest area of flat ceiling possible so it's not left with awkward gaps that can't be filled except with manual custom ceiling planes. Additionally, without that behavior, it would be impossible to have a trey ceiling polyline span a room divider, which is useful for some kinds of "open plan" designs. What is a bug is having it span room dividers when the ceiling isn't flat. That should be addressed (at least for the common cases) in the next update.

It's not necessarily a separate ceiling plane; there's a single large ceiling plane whose edges run along the walls of all rooms that the trey ceiling has extended into. To give an example, I looked at a plan today (which may have been the one you sent in) where the outer trey ceiling plane in the master bedroom "spread" through an invisible wall "doorway" into the master bath. Because of the arrangement of the plan, it was very much not obvious that it had done so, as that part of the trey ceiling was hidden by the room's own ceiling, but changing the layer color made it clearer where exactly the ceiling plane was being placed. There's probably some room for improvement in how we handle unusual cases like that one, but in the meantime, there are some workarounds, such as replacing invisible walls with doorways, that can help guide the algorithm.

In general, when you encounter this message, it likely means that the trey ceiling is extending into a room that you didn't expect it to, which, depending on the context, may or may not be a bug. If you change the color of the "Ceiling Planes" layer to something that stands out, it can be easier to see which room is getting involved.

It's not currently possible to make that second style of trey ceiling with a pair of trey ceiling polylines; whichever polyline fits inside the other in the plan view will always end up being on top. However, you can get close by adding a large rectangular molding profile at the bottom of a single trey ceiling polyline.

The trey ceiling tool is designed to span room dividers in order to avoid odd cases where the dropped section of the trey would fail to line up with the ceiling on the other side of the divider: As for the fact that the trey ceiling isn't recessing into the room's "natural" ceiling: as long as the "Recess into Ceiling" checkbox is checked and there are no rooms above the trey ceiling, it should recess into the ceiling structure. If that box is checked and it's failing to recess, that's a bug. Without looking more closely at the plan, I'm not entirely sure why you'd be seeing the warning about the ceiling heights, but if you submit a bug report, one of us should be able to take a look at it.

When working with Chief's "Print to PDF" engine, I'd recommend finding a good third-party PDF optimizer and using it to reduce the PDF's size after you "print". The engine we use generally produces good-quality results, but it's not great at image compression, which is generally the main factor that influences PDF size. PDF size is on my "things I'd like to get fixed" list too, but it's a surprisingly involved project.

Try the Temporary Dimensions button in the Toggle Modes toolbar on the far right-hand side of the screen:

Yep; looks like that stopped working in X11. I'm pretty sure I broke that, actually. I'll look into it today.

Mulling a pair of doors tends to move the casing to a different location, which is a known issue. If you adjust the "Overlap Frame" amount on the mulled unit's Casing panel to match the "Reveal" option on the original door's Casing panel (but with the sign reversed), the doors should look exactly the same.

Currently, I'm not aware of one. We synchronize layer names between layer sets even if the "Modify All Layer Sets" option is left unchecked. It looks like we've gotten similar feature requests a handful of times before. I've brought it up for discussion so the rest of the development team can decide how and when to approach that idea.

Oh, now that I think about it, that change came after the public beta release. Assuming nothing changes, though, that should work in the final release.

Unfortunately, there isn't anything you're missing; we don't provide good information about the exact locations where layers are used, and sometimes they get tucked into such obscure corners of the defaults that even the developers struggle to find them. I can't make any promises about whether we'll add that feature since I don't make those decisions myself, but I'd also like to see it get added eventually.

As far as #2 goes, if you hover over the "Used" column with your mouse cursor, there's a tooltip notification that will show up for system layers. It's kind of an awkward compromise between providing full information and cluttering the table with a lot of columns, but it might do the job for now. System layers that aren't used anywhere else in the plan or defaults also have their own icon.

It should be in the defaults for the document you opened the Layer Display Options from. So if you're in a layout view when you open the document, it'll be in that specific layout's defaults, and if you were in a plan, it'll be somewhere in that plan's defaults. Of course, that's still only about as useful as saying that a ship is "somewhere in the Pacific Ocean"; it'll still take a while to find it.

We don't currently have a feature in place to provide that information in the user interface. We're experimenting with that idea in the Line Style Management dialog, which provides some more detailed information if you hover over the "Used" column with your mouse. Once we gather enough feedback from users on how that system works for them, we may be able to extend other dialogs (particularly Layer Display Options) to provide the same kind of information. Aside from more detailed information about what's using a layer and the functionality that's already available in the Layer Display Options dialog, are there any other particular features you had in mind for what a layer management tool should provide?

That entirely depends on whether you're seeing performance that's acceptable to you. PDFs can often be a better option for text-heavy documents because they can usually be rendered at the correct resolution for printing at whatever size you need, whereas images have a fixed resolution and may sometimes look blurry on large-format prints. If you're dealing with a PDF that's just scanned from an image, though, you'll definitely be better off with a plain image. As for whether to import directly into the layout, it depends on what kind of effect you're trying to achieve. Putting the PDF in the layout helps avoid the overhead of rendering the PDF while working in your plan view, which can make editing operations considerably smoother. However, if you're primarily interested in the background's alignment relative to objects in the plan (rather than just its alignment with the layout box), then it'll be easier to keep it aligned if you put it in the plan. If you do put it directly in the plan, it's possible to use layer sets to turn it off during regular editing while still having it visible in the layout.