Alaskan_Son

That linestyle is being inherited from your Rich Text Defaults>Appearance>Border

2 quick suggestions: Use the term Default Set in your posts. Its just a little confusing when you use the term Annotation Sets or Annosets since those terms were changed quite a few verisons ago. You don't need to create a whole new Default Set. All you need to do is change the Dimension Default being used for your Saved Plan View. Of course you can create a whole new Default Set, its just not necessary in most cases.

Auto Exterior Dimensions Should automatically remove and replace any previous Auto Exterior Dimensions unless you have previously edited those dimensions in any way. Per the Help files, any edited dimension "...will be marked as edited, so if Auto Dimensions are later regenerated, your changes will not be lost."

Agree

I agree. It would be nice to have separate control over the polyline and the polyline hole. In fact, it would be nice if we could even control specific edges independently.

Try this next time (a small upgrade to the brightly colored material idea you already suggested): Open up Plan Materials and Select All. De-select the material in question Click the Merge button, click Edit, click on the Properties tab, change the Transparency to 100%, and click Okay. Click on the material in question, click Edit, and set a very bright color for the Material Color on the Pattern tab. Open a 3D view, set it to Vector View, and Rotate your model to you find what you're looking for. Click Undo a couple times to get things back to normal. NOTE: Using Vector View isn't necessary and actually won't work in older versions of Chief either, but I find it easier on the eyes than using a Standard View.

I don't think we've actually ever been able to do this Joe. To get the hole to have an invisible linestyle, you have to change the linestyle on the polyline itself.

Find in Plan would do nothing to find those materials used in Defaults.

Your deck wall is just out of alignment by about 1/16". Move it over so that its right on line with the adjacent wall and you should be good.

That's because the tutorial is located in Chief's Program Files...a location you really shouldn't be playing around with. Your $LOAD_PATH should point to a user folder (probably the folder it was already set to). I would suggest you just forget everything you have read about using the tutorial file and set your $FILE_PATH back to the default "C:\Users\Whatever Path\Chief Architect Premier X14 Data\Scripts" folder and/or your desired Z drive folder.

Changes to many of your Preferences do not take affect till next time you start the program. This is true not only of your Ruby settings but of other settings as well.

By the way, you don't have to change the load path at all. The require method can take an entire file path as an argument as well. OR, you could even optionally set your $LOAD_PATH with the same macro that requires your rb file that way no one even needs to change their preferences. Any machine that opens the plan would get the load path set automatically.

This has been pretty clear to me from the start...at least if my understanding is correct: The idea seems to be that macros can be defined and edited in a single source file so that any changes don't have to be made in every plan and on every computer. I think its actually a really good approach for offices with lots of templates and/or lots of users. In fact, using this approach, an office could drop one single macro into every template plan. That macro would require/reference the same rb file. Within that single file, a company could hypothetically create ALL their own custom macros as methods. Modify the source file to include a new method and voila, that method/macro is available to every user and in every plan. Realize something needs to be tweaked? Tweak the source file and every other instance gets tweaked accordingly. It makes solid sense to me.

Lower left hand corner of your dialog boxes…Number Style

There's no good reason to be placing code into the tutorial.rb file in my opinion. Its just a messy and confusing kludge. All you're actually doing by placing code in the tutorial file is bypassing the require line because Chief is pre-programmed to automatically load that tutorial.rb file. You can easily replace the functionality by just using require in a text macro of your own though so you don't have to fool around with defining your methods in the tutorial file. Just create and display that macro somewhere in your template plan and all the methods defined inside your appropriately required rb files will be loaded into global memory just as if you had placed them in the tutorial file. Or require the desired rb file(s) inside specific macros. Either way, just load them yourself (using require) instead of using the tutorial file workaround.

Neither of these things are true. You can indeed define and call a method with no arguments, and if the file is a valid rb file located within the $LOAD_PATH, you can even have a Safe Level of 4 and it should still work.

Did you set the macro to Evaluated:Owner? And did you move your script to a folder in the $LOAD_PATH or adjust the $LOAD_PATH to add your desired folder?

I would suggest making a handful of changes to your current approach: Add your desired folder to the $LOAD_PATH OR place the desired file inside your currently defined $LOAD_PATH. This way you can just use a file name instead of having to use the whole folder structure. Define a method inside your rb file Use require as Joe already mentioned instead of using File.read Call your defined method inside your Chief macro. All said and done, it would look more like this (using your originally supplied example): Macro: In CA require 'scope1' my_method Output: from text stored on a local drive def my_method rafter_length = (length.to_f.round / 12) + 1 convert_to_int = rafter_length.even? case when convert_to_int == true resut = rafter_length when convert_to_int == false result = rafter_length +1 end end NOTE: There are other potential approaches and corrections that could be made as well, but I wanted to stay as close as reasonably possible to your original attempt.

Snagit

I would recommend importing a DWG that already has ALL the CAD Blocks in it and then adding to the library from there. The initial import will take a bit, but overall much faster than doing one at a time.

Depending on the situation, one method I use sometimes is to single click either a Wall Material Region or Custom Backsplash and then Convert to Plain Polyline.

It does not. I suspect the main reason Chief hasn't provided it (aside from not enough people sending in requests) is because although we can set a default height, the truth is that the height can be absolutely anything (even an infinite number of values) for any given wall because the footing shape can be freely resized/reshaped in elevation. Here's what we do have though: thickness of footing - This actually reports what I would call the width though area of footing - This reports the cross sectional area of the footing polyline length of wall - This reports the length of the wall though which may or may not match the length of the footing You can get a very rough approximation of the footing height by taking the area and diving that by the length of the wall, but the results will depend on how the footing joins with adjacent footings and on whether or not the wall or its footing has been resized/reshaped in elevation. Its almost never going to be completely accurate.

As others have already said, lot of different methods. All of them are pretty kludgy and the best method depends on the situation and on your preferred workflow, but i think one of the easiest is this: Build your deck room Turn off Auto regenerate... and check Keep deck framing... Move your railings out the thickness of your newels Select the deck room and lower the floor to drop the railing bottom Some of the drawbacks to this method are immediately obvious. A couple others that may not be though: Any automatically displayed floor or ceiling heights may be incorrect Connected stairs need to have their top or bottom heights set manually You need to adjust the railing height to account for the extra height difference

I just emailed you an example project Johnny. Let me know if that clarifies things.

No. Inside that dialog, you need to check Remember Zoom/Rotation and then you need to rotate the Plan View using Tools>Rotate Plan View. Make sure to read my notes in the other post though with regard to how this setting comes into play with your other Plan Views.