Alaskan_Son

This is another problem. I suggest you read up on the various dimension tools or get a little training in this regard. The various locate settings are essentially useless after the initial pull.

Sorry, just getting back to the office so I'm a little late to the party this morning, but I think Dermot just about covered it and this example highlights exactly why its so important that we have a plan file to look at. Your Locate settings all seem decent enough (although I would personally uncheck a couple more things) but your model itself is a problem. Because you built that unit out of so many other individual cabinetry components, its difficult to know which ones your dimensions are grabbing onto. Not only that, but your items aren't even aligned correctly. Your soffit for example is offset from the items below by a fraction of an inch. Anyway, its not that what you're doing is wrong per se (aside from the misalignment), but you are indeed causing yourself dimension problems if you're going to be modeling that way with all the parts and pieces. I would also suggest you take to heart what Mick said about changing your Reach settings--particularly if you're going to be modeling out of parts and pieces like that a lot. It will make it a lot easier top avoid picking up on unwanted items. Now more specifically in regard to your modeling habits...I would suggest you consider trying to work with fewer cabinet components unless you need to use multiple pieces for some reason. That upper unit for example could pretty easily be built out of a single cabinet.

That makes it 0 for 3. Oh well, I tried. If I run into a similar problem in my own plans I’ll report to tech support and if I figure out the culprit will try to report back here. Till then or until one of y’all posts a plan....

You want to post that plan?

it sounds like you need to explore the different Arc Creation Modes.

@Whitehorse, I’m a kitchen and bath designer too, design custom cabinetry, and I very commonly have to dimension all these types of things. I appreciate where you’re coming from but you’re unlikely to EVER see anything fixed (X13, X14, X15....ever) )if you can’t provide an example plan to prove that it’s not just user error. I kinda sounds like you may not have sent an actual plan to tech support either. If it’s as consistent as you say, one of us should be able to reproduce with even the simplest of example plans. We’re honestly just trying to be helpful. Newbie or not really doesn’t mean much when Chief just made a bunch of fundamental changes to the dimensioning tools. Anyway, bottom line is that a lot of us have requested these capabilities, are glad to have them, and are making them work. If you can demonstrate a reproducible problem I’d be glad to help bug Chief to fix it. In the meantime, whether you like it or not, most people are going to assume it’s user error until you make enough effort to prove otherwise.

We actually have a dedicated arc with arrow tool too.

Agreed. For me it happens when I'm doing a whole ton of back and forth between views.

What did they tell you the problem was then?

I've experienced that first problem you showed quite a bit ever since Plan Views were first introduced. For whatever reason Chief starts picking up on settings from other open Plan Views sometimes. The library issue I can reproduce. It looks like a bug to me. 2 side notes though: First, it's not a problem if you have the object selected in the library itself rather than the preview. And second, it depends on what you're doing but if you don't switch tools you don't lose the activated library object. I'm not sure about your selection problem in particular because I couldn't quite tell what was going on, but much like the first issue with Dimension formatting, I have found that the current Saved Plan View can pick up on settings from another Saved Plan View with regard to layers being displayed or not, locked or not, etc. Sometimes its the opposite problem....I will pick up on layers that are currently turned off.

I would personally like to see a label on/off toggle in the toolbar. In the meantime, You can do as the guys above mentioned and simply turn all the label layers off. If you upgrade to X13, what you can do is simply move the label to a displayed layer for objects whose labels you want turned on. In other words use the layer as the toggle instead of the suppress label box. You can also go through all your default objects and suppress the label but that will only work for some of them and will require you add others to your user library. I would recommend the layer approach.

No, but if you set your Plan Views to Remember Zoom/Rotation then you can just click on the plan view dropdown and hit enter to return to your desired extents.

Depending on the font you're using and if you're using a Rich Text box, you can also just copy and paste the following character... ⁄ Once its pasted, arrow back to enter the numerator and then arrow forward to add the denominator.

I almost always send my views to layout as Plot Lines so these particular types of issues are pretty easy to deal with in that regard. I just have it on my to do list to go through and use the Edit Layout Lines tool to delete the few places those show up. Or, sometimes I'll just mask them in layout so they're hidden even if I refresh the view.

There are a ton of tricks and I hardly have time to go over all of them right now, but here are a few more than may not have been mentioned or highlighted: We can use railing walls set to room defintoin We can use railing walls set to no room definition We can overlap normal walls and no room definition walls We can use railing walls next to invisible walls We can use ramps next to our invisible walls We can drag railing walls down by first unchecking railing, dragging, and then converting back to railing We can check Retain Deck Framing, uncheck Auto Regenerate, move the walls out, and then lower the deck floor to drop the railings all at once We can use 3D molding polylines We can use regular molding polyllines We can use 2D extrusions and/or 3D molding symbols with our molding polylines We can apply stacked moldings to our railing profiles (using this method a person could get a middle and top rail without the bottom rail by just using a couple stacked extrusion shapes and the Raise Bottom setting) We can use distributed objects (including solids, symbols, framing objects, etc.) We can use Offsets in our symbol definitions We can use wall thickness to relocate railing as it related to the room We can use various combinations of the above I'm not sure which method I would use for this example honestly. If I have to think about it or futz with it for too long I typically just end up modeling it manually or modeling it so that its close enough.

I actually posted that in another thread earlier today as well.

To be fair, Ryan had already posted this tip. I was just covering the basics on my way through my own tips.

Yup. Comes in especially handy for things like brick stairs....

Only for annotation objects that have Multiple Saved Defaults. Otherwise, you would have to go through and change all your defaults a’l’carte. You can however wait till your done drawing and use the Layer Painter or similar.

It all depends on how valuable your time is, how quickly you want to learn, and on exactly what you really need to learn. If you have a coupe years you can glean tips here on the forum, read up on Ruby scripting, and spend many MANY hours practicing. If your time is valuable and you want to take a notable shortcut, you can hire someone to coach you through some of the basics. I offer this type of service and there may be others as well but I can't attest to that. You can also do what a lot of people do and just learn the very basic basics and just have someone write any more complicated macros for you. Just shoot me over an email if you would like to discuss further. For what it's worth, there are some fonts that wouldn't require a custom font at all like Arial.... 1-3⁄8" In fact, so long as you're using the, in a Rich Text box they wouldn't require a custom macro either. Just copy and paste this following character into any desired Rich text box, arrow back to type in the numerator, and then arrow forward to type in the denominator... ⁄ P.S. You can also use a simple online tool to copy and paste from but again, the results may or may not be so desirable depending on the font.... https://lights0123.com/fractions/ Anything beyond that would require custom macros and possibly customized fonts.

Just tested this and you're right. It seems the only way to get them to connect is to first convert the Revision Cloud to a Plain Polyline.

This is possible using custom macros, however, depending on the font you're using, the results are typically pretty ugly. The only way to do this in Chief requires using not only custom macros but also a custom font. Anyway, its usable for a lot of things but not for actual dimension strings.

Those should be connecting like any other arrow. Did you possibly uncheck the Attach Tail and/or Attach Head settings?

Exactly some of the reason I like to use solids much of the time as well. Did you watch my video? I think you and I work pretty similarly.

I wasn't trying to correct him. Just agreeing with him. Regardless of what Robert meant though.... It really helps to have those pre-configured stairs available for future use. Most of the items we've discussed above (polyline solids, solids, landings, railings, etc.) can either be added directly to the library or blocked and added to the library. Stairs on the other hand cannot. I was just agreeing and highlighting this fact. If you want to save pre-configured stairs you have to do so in either your template plan or in a warehouse plan.