Dermot

First, I took the liberty of moving your post from the Chatroom forum to the Q&A forum since this is a much better place to ask questions if you want other users to see and answer them. Next, you should confirm that you are using the latest update for your program version. We often fix critical bugs with each program update so I think it is important to always use the latest one available to avoid the problems that have already been fixed. For X17, this would be version 27.3.1.5 and you should be able to find your version listed on the program dashboard or in the Help->About dialog box. You should be able to get the latest update here: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/updates.html Next, this is often the kind of thing you should contact our Technical Support department about. Since they are closed for the Thanksgiving holiday, they will not be back in the office until next Monday. Here is the link to the support area of our web site: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/ The next step is to look for any information about the problem in our Knowledge Base articles. After a quick search, it should lead you to this tech article: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00960/message-the-plan-file-you-are-attempting-to-open-appears-to-be-corrupted.html Most often, when the development team receives a plan file that gives you this error message, it is indeed corrupted and can't be read in by the program. It is almost impossible to determine what caused the corruption just using the file by itself though. In very rare cases, we find that the "corruption" is not actually a bad file but is a result of a program bug that is causing problems while we are trying to read the file in. This is the main reason that we encourage people to report these kinds of problems because this can help us make the program better. If you would like to post your plan file on this forum, or a link to it on this forum if it is too large, I should be able to take a look at it to see if anything further can be done with it. Since the most likely case is that the file can't be used, you should see if you can find a usable archive or backup. Assuming that the program was making daily archives, then you should be able to find an archive file that is not very old. This technical support article should help you find your archive files: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00099/accessing-your-archive-files.html If this is a problem that you have been seeing repeatedly with different plans you are working on, and you are using the latest version of the program, then I would start looking into possible hardware or system problems. This technical support article may help you to diagnose possible system related problems: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-03049/troubleshooting-chief-architect-software-closing-unexpectedly-on-windows.html If all else fails, again I would recommend that you contact our Technical Support team during our normal business hours.

Please note that if you rebuild your foundation then any manual changes you have made will need to be redone. For any other cases, please send us a bug report for any situations that work the way you are describing. Please include a plan file that demonstrates the situation along with clear steps indicating what you did and the results you are seeing.

Yes Ron, that is why we released the update. This update also has a couple of other important bug fixes.

This problem should be fixed in the 27.1.1.3 update that has been released today. You can find the update along with the update notes here: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/updates.html

As Mark has suggested, you can work much more efficiently by taking advantage of Saved Plan Views. Having one saved plan view associated with your floor framing and another one for your roof framing would allow you to work in either view without having to switch anything. Saved plan views will basically keep track of your layer sets and all of your active defaults so that they will already be what you want. More information can be found in this Knowledge Base article: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-03185/understanding-saved-plan-views.html There is also a training video series that covers these topics: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/videos/playlists/100/saved-plan-views-layers-annotations.html

Regarding suggestions, please read this sticky post for more information about how we prefer you make suggestions: Please note that currently we have more than 8,000 active requests in our internal database. This represents a very large backlog which is the main reason that many of these requests have not been addressed yet. Please be assured that it our goal to implement all of them but realistically it will take a long time so please try to be patient. Keep in mind that one person's "super important" request can be another person's "who cares" request so we try to prioritize them based on the ones that we think will give the most benefit to the most people. Thank you to everyone that takes the time to let us know what is important to you.

X17 has a new tool called "Import Settings From Plan/Layout" that will allow you to import wall types from one plan into another. There have been a number of other changes and if you would like to learn more about them you might want to review this information: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/whats-new/

The "What's New in X17" webinar is here: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/videos/watch/10298/x17-sneak-peek-what-s-new.html?playlist=171 The webinar about "Project Management in X17" is here: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/videos/watch/10299/x17-file-project-management.html Please remember the new project management system is completely optional. If you want to continue to use your own file management, you can always turn it off in preferences.

Have you tried to just edit the cad block for the symbol and delete the lines you don't want? Here is a Knowledge Base article that covers the topic: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00805/editing-2d-cad-blocks-assigned-to-3d-symbols.html

Try this: 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 If you are still having problems, then please contact our Technical Support Team during our normal business hours.

Here are a couple of tech articles that might help: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-01759/troubleshooting-compatibility-problems-with-library-content.html https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-02772/troubleshooting-library-download-issues.html You may want to contact tech support on this one though because your user library might be corrupt.

Please report this problem. Please send in the X15 plan and pictures with your report.

As of this time, we have not been able to duplicate any problems with legacy plans that show manually edited dimension labels moving when brought into X16. The reports we have received so far have only demonstrated some problems with the automatic dimension label positions. We did change the code that is used to automatically position dimension labels in X16 and have found some cases where the results were not as good as we would have liked. We are working on some improvements to this code that should be available in the next update (26.2) that should be released in the near future. If anyone can find a case where a manually edited dimension label moves when brought into X16, then please submit a bug report to our technical support team. Please include the original X15 version of the plan and include pictures of what it looked like in X15 compared to what you seeing in X16. We will then look into it more to see if we can identify the problem and fix it.

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.