Doug_Park

So the problem only occurs in 3D or elevation views? Try turning off the "Synchronize with Cursor" option in Preferences Edit. Does the cursor show up at the cross hair location after you let the cross hair catch up to it? Is the feedback drawing at the right location relative to the 3D? You should be able to see this better in an elevation or a view where you are more dead on. Check with ATI for newer video drivers. Removing the mouse driver may also be a possibility. All mice these days are HID compliant, which means you don't need to install a driver to use them. When you have a 3D view up with a background image is there any offset of the content? White bands on either the top or sides of the view where it looks like the background isn't extending far enough. This would indicate a driver issue. It doesn't make any sense that switch the cross hair on would fix the problem. Also check for malware. The problem is not something we have been seeing so it seems like something particular with your system or a very particular set of operations that most people don't use. I would suggest contacting our support team to work through the issues.

As far as I know Perry was never banned from posting. Certainly there were no posts that I saw that would have justified banning him. As far as I'm concerned he is one of the nicer people on this forum.

When you move the mouse over an edit handle does the cursor change? If you minimize the main window and then maximize it do things start to work again?

I went back and reviewed the original images again and then tried to recreate the situation you showed. In the place setting I found in the library the plate is a CAD circle. Since we draw circles as line segments using the DPI of the device being drawn on choosing 72DPI will cause the problems you are seeing. If one were to create the CAD block from the symbol you would see a less circular plate. After looking at the images you posted again I don't think that is what you are seeing.

The images you posted look like wall elevations not cross sections. There is a big difference in that wall elevations are not supposed to show the side walls. I know that at one point in time we fixed bugs with the wall elevations to fix cases where the walls were shown when they shouldn't be.

A second factor with PDF is the resolution of the end points of lines. For a lower resolution DPI the endpoints of lines will lie on the grid that the DPI defines. For example imagine that you have a 1 DPI grid. At that resolution the endpoints of each line would hit on a 1" boundary. A 10 DPI grid would give you output that is accurate to 1/10th of an inch and a 100 DPI grid would give you output accurate to 1/100th of an inch. The simple answer is that you need to pick a DPI that is suitable for your printer. If your printer is 600 DPI then 600, 1200, 2400 etc. would be good choices. 72 DPI is the low end of what would be acceptable for things to be displayed on screen, although these days something closer to 200 DPI would be better given that the current trend is toward displays with higher resolution. Fonts can also be affected by this in that at a very low resolution they will not be placed accurately leading to odd spacing even though they draw smooth. In Chief you can also hand craft the CAD block to represent the 2D, which is likely what other programs are doing. If you zoom in on a PDF or get a magnifying glass out and look at printed output you will start to notice all kinds of odd artifacts. The real question is does it look good when printed?

Best guess is hitting one of the hot keys. If you don't use the hot keys for snaps it might be worth removing them.

The issue is the CAD block that represents the symbol you are printing. The Circe that was created was likely derived from the 3D data. If you do a top down view in 3D you should be able to verify this.

Are you using the cross section tool or the wall elevation tool?

Using angular dimensions is also a good way to get things to line up. Drop in an angular dimension between two walls. Select the wall you want to move. Click on the angular dimension. Type in the angle.

Doors, Windows and pretty much every other part of the program have deficiencies. We know about many, probably not all. We prioritize things based on what we perceive are the things people need the most. In some cases this is based on who is squeaking the loudest, but usually it is about how many people are asking for something. Keep asking for stuff. What you want is what we want.

If you are serious about using Chief to do production work on modern hardware I would highly encourage an upgrade. Version 10 barely ran on Vista. If you are going to stay with version 10 I would recommend running XP. X2, 2 versions newer than Version 10, was the first version of Chief to fully adapt to the more modern Vista based operating systems. We have also done a lot of work to improve performance on modern systems by supporting multiple cores and more modern video cards.

Wendy has been extremely busy from what I hear.

The same named font on Windows and Mac may not be identical. For example Arial is ever so slightly different on Mac so you can occasionally see extremely minor differences if you get a light table and compare print outs. If you can arrange to do so install the same font on both machines and this shouldn't be a problem. Of course you could get the same issue going between Windows machines as well. For the most part everything should be seamless.

This is why I rarely install mouse drivers. For some reason the developers of these drivers think that doing something different than the OS defined default behavior is somehow better. I don't get it. They should install so that you only get the additional "features" if you ask for them.

Storing your details in a user library as CAD blocks works well. It uses less memory and compute resources than other methods. You can also leverage the library searching capabilities. Editing these details requires exploding the block. Storing your details in a plan, or layout file is another option that has been used by many for years and at some point in time was a better option because details could not be stored in the library. It uses more compute resources because every detail in a plan is loaded into memory when the file is opened. Searching is somewhat less good, but if you have a relatively small number of details this is not a big deal. They can be slightly easier to manage and edit if they are stored as CAD Details instead of blocks. Referencing details from multiple plans using this method can result in unexpected changes to another layout so one needs to be careful if you are editing a detail for one layout that is used in another. But on the other hand if you need to correct a detail for all layouts that use it, this is much more efficient.

A potentially easier way to manage this is to load the free PDF of the manual on to your smart phone or tablet. I highly recommend reading the manual. 90% of the posts on this forum would be unnecessary if people read and comprehended what is in it.

I'm seeing it on my laptop on the first selection click in a 3D view. After that it no longer blinks. It is pretty annoying. It is much more noticeable if you have a larger area of darker textured stuff like a terrain. On my machine this only occurs once after the view is activated and then seems to behave correctly from then on. This seems to be a Chief problem, although updating your drivers is probably a good thing to do in any case.

Look at the control panel for your Mouse.

The choice to do iPad for room planner was made several years ago when it was the dominant platform. Today if we made the choice of which to do first it would more than likely be Android.

Pressing the scroll wheel to pan should work fine, unless the mouse driver is getting in the way.

Run chkdsk to see if you have disk issues. Also check for malware. Overheating could also be a cause. A can of air to blow the dust out could help.

Any crash is serious and we will work hard to fix the ones we know about. If we don't know about it, it won't get fixed. We do a lot of thorough internal testing but sometimes there are factors involved that are hard to reproduce or only reproduce on certain machines because of timing or other reasons. The undo crash is something that should be fairly easy to get to the bottom of. Please work with our support team to nail down a set of reproducible steps so that we can deal with it. Crashes are usually easy to fix, if we can reproduce them. However, from time to time we run across cases that are hard to reproduce. Sometimes a particular plan makes it easy to reproduce, sometimes it is a particular order of operations. In some cases there is a bit of randomness to the crash. In any case we do take these seriously and work very hard to fix them as quickly as we can.

Blue screens are almost always an indicator of a hardware failure. Bad memory is the most likely culprit, but other things can be the cause. Sometimes there is a clue in the blue screen. You may want to capture it with a camera and share that with your IT guy. Depending on your hardware there may be a system level diagnostic, such as what Dell provides, to test the hardware. Another option is to run memtest to see if it shows a problem with memory. http://www.memtest.org/ Hardware failures like this are very frustrating, but if you can diagnose the problem they can sometimes be fairly cheap to fix.

Pretty much the entire line of Macs is sufficient to run Chief. Whether a particular machine is fast enough for your needs depends somewhat on the complexity of your models and your expectations. If this is to be your primary design machine I would definitely go for the higher end MacBook Pro. I run Chief on a 2 year old MacBook Air. To me the performance on that machine is surprisingly good. But then I don't do production work on it. Mostly I use it to see how things are running on the Intel graphics. The new Mac Pros are disappointing in performance given the price, but do seem to run Chief well. The lack of .skp import is an unfortunate limitation imposed on us by Trimble. They don't supply a 64 bit library for Mac, which seems completely counter intuitive since all Macs currently shipping run only 64 bit operating systems. If they ever do supply a library we will look into integrating that support. We do, however, support COLLODA. Plus if you import an .skp file on Windows you can easily copy the library or plan it is in over to the Mac. We made the ability to share files between Windows and Mac as seamless as possible.