Hi Will, definitely these are great ideas, I know the lack of error or just feedback in general is a problem.

I haven't quite figured out a particularly nice unobtrusive way to handle it yet, it will probably take some experimenting with a variety of methods, that's why it hasn't made it into V1. Just like you mentioned, something that whapped you in the face too much would get annoying.

One thing I have thought about is a text box in the lower-right corner of the screen, possibly even a bit wider than the side pane (imagine the Options and Help buttons sliding over to the left a bit for that).

One problem is that is can be difficult to phrase error messages or feedback with only a few words, I often times have problems with trying to squeeze very much text into just the width of the side pane... Streaming messages down to the bottom-right corner would be pretty unobtrusive, but maybe _too_ unobtrusive...

- Michael

Dunno, I've sorta got used to looking for that status line at the top ("Calculating..."), if I have to also start looking at the bottom? Dunno...

Okay!, That's it! - It's time for MOI to have Voice Prompting!


Hmmm, Majel Roddenberry hasn't had any Star Trek voice acting, or cameo parts in a while now - I'm sure she'd LOVE to lend her voice for the differing voice prompts and status msgs you may need! :-p

-Will

Probably one line is not going to cut it for many messages though...

The other thing that would be nice about an out of the way area is it would work as a general area to stream non-error supplemental information, like some commands could spit out various information about what just happened on successful operations too (think stuff like "joined 25 curves into 3 closed loops", etc... ).

It will take some experimentation to see what different approaches feel like.

- Michael

Thankyou and much appriciated help

Sorry fro the delay in responding was quite ill yesteday (flu - yuck)

getting my head around the concepts of MoI is the hard step but once you know
its really fun .

Im having difficulty knowing how or when surfaces are retain or lost but you suggestions have helped

For making PDF there is an excellent software called PagePlus by serif
which I use and does a wounderful job also the the open source Scribus but havent used this much as yet