G’day folks –
Sprung for TurboCad 9 Professional thanks to their e-mail offer. Seemed like a good deal for a pro level CAD program. Got it loaded, played around, drew lots of squiggles, and now … no lines. I must have hit a toggle or control somewhere.
When I pick a line drawing tool, I get the crosshair cursor and the prompt to “Define the start point of the line”, but I can’t draw a line. The prompt remains the same, so I am apparently not drawing an invisible line. Program says I’m drawing a black, pen style line.
Any hints? Also, any general hints about other learning tools, etc. It came with a reference manual that’s somewhere near 400 pages. Guess I’ll start there.
Thanks!
Formerly BEMW at The High Desert Group LLC
Replies
Bruce,
As I have no experience with TurboCad maybe I cam be of some help besides just a bump… I use AutoCad and you may have found the current layer you are drawing on has been turned “off”.
What I mean is, lets say a room full of furniture is the setting. If I turn the lights off and move a chair… well, since the light is off, I cannot see that the chair has been moved but when the light is turned back on… wa-la… chair is in the wrong spot.
Find a way to turn the layer back on and you will see every thing you have been doing… should be quite a mess. If you have been playing with a drawing you need to keep (and for the moment lets say you have not saved it) just close the application and choose NO when asked if you want to save.
Turn the layer back on and all will be fine… Fair Dinkum!!!
I hope this helps some… Lee
Oh, maybe a few night classes will help with the learning curve.
Thanks for the hints. Couldn't find the fix, and I was pretty sure I had left all the settings at default ... guess not. But you'd be surprised how fast I could uninstall and reinstall that CD to get everything working again.Formerly BEMW at The High Desert Group LLC
I used to use Turbo, even beta tested versions 6 and 7. Lee's suggestion to check for layers turned off is a good one. In the early versions, you could go through the motions of drawing with the layer off and get nothing. Also check background and line colors, you could set them to be the same in those versions and get lines that you can't see.
Turbo runs a very fast upgrade treadmill, they want you to pop for a new version every 6 months. They add features, but they don't fix bugs. I switched to AutoCad LT, which has a much better user interface for the basic drawing functions that I use the most. I'm much happier with ACad than I was with Turbo.
-- J.S.
If you don't mind me asking, how much did that Auto Cad Lt. go for. I'm in the market, sort of, and don't want to go the 3,000 + for the recent Auto Cad. Anybody recommend the best value of software for a general builder?
If you go to computer fairs, you can find legit copies of AutoCad LT for as little as $350. In the conventional retail stores, it's somewhere in the $500 - 600 ballpark. But the real savings is that you don't have to upgrade every six months. Older versions are supported much longer than with Turbo, which makes its real money hitting you for upgrades.
Someone else mentioned snaps -- Turbo didn't have anything like the snap options that exist in ACad LT. In LT, you roll the cursor to a line and it'll give you the options of endpoint, nearest, perpendicular, midpoint, etc, when you roll near them. In Turbo, you had to go to a tool bar and select perpendicular mode, for instance, and then mouse back into the drawing. When you were done doing perpendiculars, you had to go to the tool bar and change modes again. It did have some limited snap functionality, but I don't remember all that well what it was.
-- J.S.
I have TurboCab 3.0 and while you have to the toolbar to permantely change the snap-to you can right click and override it for any point that you want.
Also the the person that ask this (I don't like only seeing one message at a time when in reply mode) if he knows AC then there is an open source clone of AC that think is about $99 on CD rom and some accessories and free if for the stripped version and 239 hours of down load <G>.
Hopefully someone else will post the name.
Are you talking about Intellicad?
Mine only took three hours or so to download..
Excellence is its own reward!
That sounds like it.
Maybe if I stretch the string I little tighter I can get tha download down to about 99 hours <G>.
My intellicad folder is 30.5 mega bytes. How does that translate in bps? My isp connection is about 42,ooo bps.
Excellence is its own reward!
A byte is 8 bits, so 30.5 megabytes would be 244 Mbits. Your connection is 42K bits per second, but there are overhead bits for error correction included in that stream, so the rule of thumb is to treat it as if it were 10 bits per byte. That would be 305,000/42 seconds, which works out to about two hours.
-- J.S.
I have a very early version of TurboCard, but this "problem" is common to many cads.
Check to see what it is set for Snap To or some similar setting. For exmaple if it is set to snap to the start of a line and you don't have any line on the page then there is nothing to snap to.
Likewise if you have snap to grid, but the grid is so big that no points are on the screen.
Bruce,
Here is the site of the TurboCAD forums more or less:
http://www.imsisoft.com/forums/index.cfm?CFApp=200&
You might have to trim it a bit or maybe just Google for IMSI which makes TurboCAD.
My guess is that you have to click and DRAG to produce your lines. That is, click ant the start point, hold down the button and move the cursor to the end point and then release.
In any event, a lot of the posters are also the programmers of the thing. Hope this helps.
~Peter