Ok, I've been working on getting a UI to control this stuff for exporting to AI and PDF formats.

This is what I'm currently going to try:



Scale can be either "Fit to page" or "Preserve units".

If you push "Line style options", then another dialog will pop up that will let you control how the different kinds of lines are written for line width, color, and if they should go on a specific layer. You can pick "From style" if you want the color or layer to come from its style assignment, or "Custom" if you want to override that with a specific color or layer instead.




Please let me know if anything important looks like it is missing.

Thanks,
- Michael

Make the dialog box "adaptative" (in horizontal dimension) for the future text translation! ;)

Hi Pilou,

> Make the dialog box "adaptative" (in horizontal dimension) for the future text translation! ;)

Yup, that is how it works already - the dialog is automatically sized to fit the content inside of it. If the translated text is longer the dialog will also get wider as well.

- Michael

Hi Michael,
this looks perfect, orderly and by no means overloaded or too complex to me.
I suppose choices are sticky so one has to set this only once to his/her personal needs.

There's a typo in the export window: silhouettes should have one more T.

What unit are the line widths (0.1, 3, 0.4 ..) in the export option window?

Maybe a little example image with arrows for show the different possibilities will be a big help!
(outline, silhouette etc...

Hi Martin,

> this looks perfect, orderly and by no means overloaded or too complex to me.

Great! At first I was trying to put it all on one single dialog and that was getting pretty overloaded. I also experimented some with having a different individual dialog for doing the line type (width / color / layer) of each category but it kind of seemed nice to have that all on one place so it was easier to see them all at once.


> I suppose choices are sticky so one has to set this only once to his/her personal needs.

Yeah I want to save everything you see there in moi.ini so any changes you make here will persist between sessions.



> There's a typo in the export window: silhouettes should have one more T.

Thanks for catching this!



> What unit are the line widths (0.1, 3, 0.4 ..) in the export option window?

In "points" units.


Thanks, - Michael

Hi Pilou,

> Maybe a little example image with arrows for show the different possibilities will be a big help!
> (outline, silhouette etc...

It's a good idea, but I think it would be kind of hard to show it very clearly without some fairly large images, and that would then somewhat overwhelm the dialog.

Some example images would probably work work well in the help file.

- Michael

hi michael

looks good. For me the only thing missing is another option in scale drop down menu - I would love to be able to set a percentage - i.e.. 20%. I think is maybe not an option which is yet programmed . . .

matt

Hi Michael,

I was going to ask for even more complexity :-) i.e. an units option for the line width but then I remembered that one typographic point equals 1/72 inch.

Since its a set and forget setting here's a quick table showing the point values for different technical pen sizes.
The formula is MM / 25.4 * 72

Hi Michael,

> I would love to be able to set a percentage - i.e.. 20%.

Yes, i agree.

Otherwise its perfect. It will improve my workflow by 500%. Thanks.

Carlos

This is quite detailed!
it's becoming a quite hefty feature.

Too me it looks great, maybe a resolution indicator in gray text next to the megapixel input box could be handy.
I'm not used to size things in megapixels and seeing the resolution would help to figure out, for example if I need something around 2500px wide for a letter size image @300dpi.



Marc

Hi matt,

> looks good. For me the only thing missing is another option in scale drop down menu - I
> would love to be able to set a percentage - i.e.. 20%. I think is maybe not an option
> which is yet programmed . . .

You should be able to get a percentage scale using the "Preserve units" option shown above... To scale by 20% you would say:

    1 unit in MoI = 0.2 units on page

Won't that do what you are asking for? Or do I maybe not understand how the percentage scale is supposed to work?

- Michael

Hi Marc,

> Too me it looks great, maybe a resolution indicator in gray text next to the megapixel
> input box could be handy.
> I'm not used to size things in megapixels and seeing the resolution would help to figure out, for example if I
> need something around 2500px wide for a letter size image @300dpi.

The way it works is the actual specific image resolution is fit to go around the objects being exported, so for example if you have a set of objects that are wide horizontally you'll get a wide image too.

So the specific pixel dimensions are not fixed, it will vary depending on what's actually being exported.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

Any chance of getting 4 tick boxes for each Projecton Views, and export all ticked at the same time, with the same scale, appending one sufix on each file like FileName-FRONT, FileName-3D, and so on?

Otherwise have to export 4 times the very same file. Its doable, or does it make sense to you?

Carlos

Hi Carlos, right now I just don't have things set up to export multiple views like that, I think I'm going to focus for the first release of this just on getting one single view at a time and try to make sure that's working ok to begin with.

Then in the future maybe I could add in a option for "All" under the "Projection view" option that would then put in 4 views into the same file... Is it important to you for the views to remain in separate files rather than arranged in a grid on one single page?

- Michael

Hi Michael,

4 Views in the same file is even better, actually with 4 separate Files/Views i'll end up gathering the 4 in 1 file/drawing.

Thanks.

Carlos

Hi Carlos, one other question - with 4 views in the same file do you expect the page to be oriented as "landscape" type mode or still "portrait" type display mode?

- Michael

""""""""""""""""""""''The way it works is the actual specific image resolution is fit to go around the objects being exported""""""""""""""""""

Hi Michael,

That's how I understood it, the numbers displayed would be that custom resolution.
It's not worth the trouble if it's too complicated, I'm sure I will quickly get used to estimate resolutions in that fashion.

Marc

Landscape, please ; )

Hi Marc,

> That's how I understood it, the numbers displayed would be that custom resolution.

Yeah unfortunately it's not currently easy for the dialog code to know that resolution at the point that the dialog will be displayed, it's something that's calculated by the hidden line removal engine after it receives those parameters to use...

It could be possible to recode that, but it can be somewhat inconvenient in general for UI code to interact back and forth with low level engine code.


That same resolution will control not only the shaded image resolution, but also the resolution of the depth map that's used for hidden/visible determination. So if you are getting some smaller size details not coming through that will be a parameter you can increase to make the depth map more fine grained too.

- Michael