Dermot

First, you should always report problems like this directly to our technical support team instead of posting on this suggestions forum. More information about contacting our support team can be found here: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/ Second, we were able to duplicate a problem like this in the beta version and I believe it was fixed in the official release (26.1.0.44). If you are not using the 26.1 update, you should download and install it. If you are using 26.1 and still seeing this problem, then please contact our tech support team and send them the plan and layout you are seeing the problem in.

Unfortunately, that message means that the file is corrupt and there is nothing we can do to read it. It was most likely corrupted by something on your system and not as a result of a bug in X16. Here is a tech article that may help you to find a usable archive file: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00099/accessing-your-archive-files.html Here are some more tech articles that may help with file system problems: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00973/message-unable-to-open-the-file.html https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00960/message-the-plan-file-you-are-attempting-to-open-appears-to-be-corrupted.html As far as any other problems you are having with X16, please report them to our tech support team so that we can look into them further. Please remember that X16 is still in its beta test phase so you should expect to find some problems but most of them should either be fairly obscure or minor at this point. We will try to fix all reported bugs before the official release but if people don't report them they are much less likely to get fixed.

Please remember that X16 is still in a beta test phase. If you find any problems in X16, please be sure to report these problems to our technical support team. If this is not something that you are able to do do, then you should continue to use X15 until X16 is officially released. For a problem such as this, please be sure and send us the original X15 plan that shows the newel posts. If we can confirm that they are missing in X16, then we will try to get a fix for this into the next available update.

Here you go, I think this is the right link: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/videos/watch/10289/x16-sneak-peek-what-s-new.html

Here is a Knowledge Base article that covers the basics of working on multiple computers: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00956/using-chief-architect-on-multiple-computers.html If you have additional questions, our tech support team should be done with their weekly meeting now.

Please post this plan along with detailed steps for exactly how you are trying to draw the text with leader line and someone here will be more than happy to look into this.

At this time, we have no reports of problems with room labels getting turned off automatically. If you can reproduce a case where this happens, then please report this to our technical support team. If we can reproduce this problem in-house, then we will try to get a fix into the next available update. More info about reporting problems can be found here: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/ On a side note, it seems that if you can use "undo" to bring them back, then in theory it should be easier to figure out what change caused them to disappear. Figuring out the exact steps that can cause this to happen would be very helpful to include with your bug report.

There is lots of good info in the above posts, but also some confusion. Unfortunately, there is no single rule that applies to everything in Chief Architect so it will depend on what type of object and what type of data you are actually looking at. For example, we have code for cabinets that always rounds the width and depth to the nearest 1/16" for imperial plans and to the nearest mm for metric plans. This is done based on how we store the data in memory and on disk and is a holdover from the days when memory and disk space were much more limited. The code that we use for handling the heights doesn't have this same limitation since we completely changed it a few years ago to make the heights more consistent throughout the whole program. We also have some newer things that were added to cabinets that are more accurate, such as door/drawer overlaps and reveals. It is possible to set your reveal to a very small value such as 1/64" or even a fraction of a mm and the program should keep this value. The thing that makes this a bit more confusing is that the dialog box might be set to display the values rounded to the nearest 1/16" or mm. The best way to see what your actual value stored is would be to use the "Number Style" button from any dialog box and set it to display using "Decimal Inches" instead of "Fractional Inches". Or, if you are in a metric plan, you can make sure you are displaying "Decimal Millimeters" instead of just "Millimeters" (which should be the default). If you want to know how accurate any given dialog box control is, you can then type in something like 1/32" and if the dialog shows you 0.0625" then you will know it is being rounded to the nearest 1/16" and if shows you 0.03125" then you know it will allow you to specify the value as accurate as you like. In a metric plan, you can type in 0.25 mm and see if the program will round it to 0 mm or not. Please note that our long term goal is to make all of the values we store as accurate as possible, but it might take us a while to get there. If there is a particular value for a particular type of object that you would like us to make more accurate, then please submit a feature request asking for what you want. We will then evaluate it further to see if it is something we can do sooner rather than later. I hope this information helps to clarify some of these things.

Depending on your current computer, you may be able to get the results you want with a new graphics card instead of a whole new machine. The tech article has some information about the minimum system requirements: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/products/sysreq.html And this blog article has some information about purchasing a computer specifically for running Chief Architect: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/blog/computer-for-design-and-gaming/

I am going to assume that you imported the pdf directly onto the layout page. Try importing the pdf into a cad detail first. Then when you send the cad detail to the layout you will be able to shape the layout box any shape you want.

Currently, we have no open reports of any problems related to losing manually edited deck framing. Our lead engineer in charge of the framing in Chief spent a good deal of time yesterday investigating this area and was not able to find any problems that would cause this. If anyone can come up with repeatable steps to reproduce this problem, then please contact our tech support department so that we can look into this further.

My guess is that something happened on your system to change the file associations back to X8. This could have been done manually or it could have happened automatically if you reinstalled X8 for example. There are probably a number of other ways that it could have happened as well. Regardless, if you ever run into the case where trying to open a ".plan" or ".layout" file starts the wrong program you should be able to fix it now.

Just to be clear, Chief has never been able to save a ".plan" or ".layout" file using an older version file format. We can read files from older versions but we can't write them in a way that the older version can read it. This means that any file saved from X12 will always be an X12 file regardless of how or where you save it (unless you open it up in a newer version and then save it). This is really just a system problem having to do with file associations. When you use "file open" from your operating system it will automatically start a program and then pass it the file name to open. On your system, it sounds like it was automatically opening X8 instead of X12. You should have then gotten an error message saying that X8 could not read the file because it was written by a newer version. The solution is to tell your system to use X12 when you want to open up ".plan" and ".layout" files. For future reference, we have a tech support article that explains how to change your system settings so that your version of Chief Architect is associated with these files. You can find the article here: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-01131/associating-plan-layout-and-library-files-with-the-latest-version-of-chief-architect-or-home-designer.html

Chief Architect Interiors X14 does not have the ability to add additional text to dimensions or to suppress the current dimension value. You could try creating a manual text object with a white background to hide dimension value and display the value that you want. I would highly recommend that you make any needed adjustments to your plan instead so that your plan more accurately represents the model. Another possible solution would be to adjust the dimension rounding. If you are having difficulty doing either of these, then you may want to post more questions asking for help on how to solve these problems. We also have a number of training videos as well as training services available: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/videos/#playlist-92 https://www.chiefarchitect.com/training/

DXF and DWG files are usually considered 2D CAD files but they can also contain elevation data. If the DWG file you are importing has elevation data in it then you should be able to use the Import Drawing tool and convert this data into Chief terrain data. More information can be found in this tech article: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00719/importing-terrain-elevation-data-from-a-dxf-or-dwg-file.html