New Text, Leaders and Dimensions

Serengeti (Rhino WIP)
1

In the WIP that went out yesterday, we have gotten pretty close to a feature complete state for new annotations, meaning that most if not all of the features for V6 are included.
There will surely be bugs, and we’d like to hear about them, but most if not all of the things I’ve seen go by here have been fixed.
I know of a couple of things that still need some fixing, but it would be better to report things than to assume we know about them now.

There are new objects for all of the dimensions, text and leaders.
The commands are the same as before.

There are new fields in dimension styles and new dialogs.
Text, Leaders and Dimensons all use dimension styles now.
Some fields in dimension styles only affect some annotations.
For example, the vertical alignment of text in dimensions is set in the Text section of the dialog and for leaders, it’s set in the Leader section.

There is more complete handling of tolerance settings
Zero suppression can be controlled
There are more options for appearance of leaders including vertical alignment and curve type
Blocks can be used as arrows on dimensions and leaders

Rhino files with old style annotations will be converted when you read the files.
AutoCAD read and write supports new annotations and other formats, AI and DGN will before too long.

Overrides on individual obejcts are made in the object properties dialogs and don’t have explicit check marks like they did.
When some value is overridden the field in object properties will show up in blue. To reset overrides, click on the Style dropdown and choose the option to reset.

There will be a more formal run down on this stuff coming from @Margaret before too long.

If things don’t work for you or you think we should change the way something works, this is the the time to tell us.

Thanks for your help with this.
Lowell

3

Enjoying this so far. A few things I’ve come across:

Angular dims don’t seem to be respecting the Dimension Text Placement. Over here, with that set to horizontal to view, I am seeing the text on angle dimensions rotated about 45 degrees or so.

I can’t double click a dim to edit it.

If I place a linear dim in layout space, snapping to some model space geometry, then pull dim text off the dimension (say it doesn’t fit and I want to draw it close by with a leader), when I double click into a detail and back out again, the dim re-centers. I assume this is due to dim history (which seems to be working nicely in the short time I’ve played with it).

If I place a linear dim in layout space, snapping to some model space geometry, and the detail is not 1:1, then in the properties window edit the dim text (leaving the <>, but say adding O.C. TYP.), the dimension now displays the layout space distance, instead of the model space distance (so if a detail is 1:48, and I pull a dim off of an object that is 24" long in model space, before I edit, the dim correctly reads 2’-0", once I edit the dim in its properties window, the dim will now read 1/2"). If I double click in and out of the detail, the dim text will correctly update (and re-center).

I can’t seem to find a way to change the arrow on radial and diameter dimension, either in a dim style or on an override.

If I delete a dim, then in a separate step delete the thing I snapped to to draw that dimension, I still get a warning that I am breaking history. If the dim has been deleted, do I need a warning that I’m breaking history to a non existent object?

There are some great improvements in here, thanks for those. With the dim re-centering issue though I may have to put off working with it for the moment, but I’m excited with what I see.

Thanks again,
Sam

4

Thanks for looking at it.
That will give me something to do this week

5

Lowell, are you planning on getting in a preview like we had in RH5?
I see that one can change the style in the object properties and have immediate feedback but that only overrides the style for the selected dimension.

6

The radial and diameter dimensions get their arrows from the settings under the leaders.

7

The list with properties doesn’t always get a scrollbar added when more properties are available below the lower border of the Rhino Options dialog. Collapsing a section and expanding it again forces the scrollbar to be added.

(Granted, I’ve seen that happening with settings for display modes in the past but I cannot seem to trigger that happening there in this build.)

8

Yes, A preview button got sifted to the bottom somehow. I’ll get it back on the list.
Thanks

9

OK, That scrollbar thing is pretty touchy, I haven’t seen it mess up in quite a while but I’ll watch for it.

10

Ah, yes I see now, thanks.

A few other items I ran into:

When saving down from v6 to 5, it seems all dims in layout space lose their scale (displaying the layout space distance as opposed to the model space distance), which at this point may not be very surprising as v6 and v5 dims seems to be fairly different beasts. If the file is a v5 / v6 hybrid (some dims placed in v5, then opened in v6 and some dims placed in v6), when saved down to v5, then reopened in v6, the v6 dims will regain their scale when you double click into a detail (which is amazing), but the v5 dims seem lost forever.

One of my v6 dims (one which I was trying to pull the text off and edit the text), ended up looking like {\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\uc1\htmautsp\deff2{\fonttbl{\f0\fcharset0 Times New Roman;}{\f2\fcharset0 Arial;}}{\colortbl\red0\green0\blue0;\red255\green255\blue255;}\loch\hich\dbch\pard\plain\ltrpar\itap0{\lang1033\fs20\f2\cf0 \cf0\ql{\fs24\f2 {\ltrch <> VENT CENTER}\li0\ri0\sa0\sb0\fi0\ql\par}
}
} in v5

Can I un-stack dimension fractions as an override?

Thanks,
Sam

11

I’ll look at the modelspacescale stuff.

Just checked in a fix for the second part about some v5 conversions writing a bunch of crap to the dimension

Stacking isn’t exposed as an override. I’ll ask for that.

1 Like
12

To be honest, I don’t see this as a major issue. It would be nice to have if possible, but it would in no way stop my from using v6.

Sam

13

As for the preview that is in place - it still seems to suffer from the occasional infiltration from the actual model (in this pic it is infiltration from paper space).

blob.jpg817×240 40.5 KB

14

Well then, how about adding an optional “1000 separator”?

screenshot from Excel:

15

Just crashed Rhino when playing around with the dim styles. There was no crash dialog box offering to send in a report.

I had placed a few dims on a simple model and then made a new dim style with fractional inches and alternative text in mm… When I wanted to place a new dim using this new style, Rhino disappeared.

–
Started Rhino again - opened the AutoSaved model, went back to document properties and added the style again (which wasn’t saved by autosave yet). Rhino crashed immediately.

16

Hi @lowell

I had a crash too when trying ‘SelDimStyle’, haven’t managed to repeat it yet. (6.0.17010.13211, 10-Jan-17)

I like the way the grips are on, with the selected dimension and leader and they can be adjusted cleanly without picking up it’s neighbours, also some nice new text edit features. Here are a few items from a test run on the new dims:

Selected dimension shows a leader button icon in the propeties panel.

Propert overrides is missing from properties panel - this was really useful when visually obvious in the V5 dimension properties.

Where is the dimstyle edit access from properties disappeared to?

Opening a V5 file with several different dimstyles in modelspace - V6 sets all the dimstlye scales to 1, if a Dimstyle is changed to the correct scale all the non-dimension text balloons in size accordingly (this makes V6 unusable for existing 2D files, with dims and text in modelspace, at the moment)

Pasted image1130×747 59.7 KB

SelDimStyle not working (caused a crash at some point).

Can’t find a reference to Draw Forward in the help file - what does it do? As it is checked by default, what is it doing to my file?

I miss the simple edit field on double-click for text and dimension text for quick rewording or spelling - I think, probably get used to the new one fairly quickly.

Double-click on a dimension to edit it’s text not working.

Leader is nice with text placement options - underline creates large space between text and the underscore - maybe something to do with modelspace scale.

Changing current dimstyle in Document Properties not working.

When adjusting the wrap feature on a text field, the changes are not in sync during the change, see image, text actually disappears during the adjustment and stays that way after. Attached the text in question - adjust the wrap in one click to see the problem.

Leader Test.3dm (81.4 KB)

Pasted image1028×823 85.1 KB

Dimension property panel needs a secondary scroll bar to catch some of the options in the panel - the current one is set to the text box, but not the panel (looks like it flashes up momentarily and disappears)

Pasted image302×932 13.1 KB

Text size display to default 3 decimal places and Modelspace scale to 4 in the edit panel seems a bit of an overkill for general drafting work.

Wish- Diameter dimension could be mistaken for a radius on the shop floor as it just has the one arrow, especially when inside the circle (same as V5)

Have we lost the ability to have the radius and diameter text horizontally placed.

In V5, I normally use blank leader arrows with separate text to end up with fine leaders lines on drawings - I’d love to use the leaders as they are designed, any chance of allocating a print width to leader and dim lines which is different to text print width (another wish).

17

I’m not sure if you are saying that it’s not possible to override properties or that it merely was more visible in RH5? When you change a value in the properties panel in the current WIP, that value overrides the dimension style.

That was a useful short-cut, yes.

I’m not seeing that here. Do you change the radio button to another dimstyle and doing that doesn’t make it current when exiting DocProperties?

18

That’s a great new feature set!

About tolerance:
Besides numbers, we need to be able to set free text.
E.g. ‘H7’, which is a tolerance code.
Also it is necessary to be able to en/disable the upper and lower tolerance output.

-C-H-A-R-L-E-S-

1 Like
19

Can you send me the file?

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When you change properties in the object properties dialog, it makes overrides to the style for that particular dimension.
The overridden property shows blue in the dialog.
To reset overrides, click the Style dropdown and choose the option to remove overrides.
Is that going to work for you? It’s intended to be better. Is it?

It’s coming.[quote=“BrianM, post:16, topic:40283”]
Opening a V5 file with several different dimstyles in modelspace - V6 sets all the dimstlye scales to 1
[/quote]

We fixed at least one problem that sounds a lot like that yesterday.
There are probably other combinations that still cause problems.
If possible, post or send me a file and I’ll see what I can do to get it to convert right.

I’ll check on that

Yes, it’s coming soon

That space is controlled by TextGap * DimScale.
If you have something that doesn’t work right, I’ll try to fix it

I haven’t seen problems with that - I’ll need more details

I’ll check out your file. Thanks for that.

I’ll see what we can do about that - We’ve had several different tries at scroll bar combinations - I’m a little behind on that myself I think.

Do you mean that you want a line across a circle with 2 arrows?

No, Leader TextAngle controls radial dimension text angle too. I see that it hasn’t made it into the overrides yet though, but it will be there.

There is a chance. It’s supported at a low level but not in display yet. When we get this and display both more smoothed out, I’ll see about getting that in. It doesn’t really go too well with our way of assigning print width on other objects so I can’t just turn it on easily.

Thanks a lot for making the effort to check this out.