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Subject: 
Re: LPub 4 Web page
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.cad
Date: 
Mon, 14 Jul 2008 05:45:01 GMT
Viewed: 
6525 times
  
   Hi Allen,

So, can I twist your arm to put in some of those obtuse MLCad defined meta-commands like ROTSTEP and BUFEXCHG, that we talked about at “House of Bricks”? The are vital parts of making rich building instructions.

Kevin (prod, prod) Clague

Oh they’re high on the list. And you just gave me a very big incentive!

Meanwhile, I have been able to investigate LPub this weekend. I am very impressed. This is a night-and-day difference from the previous version. It’s great to see all the power of your program wrapped up in a nice clickable UI. I feel like I can actually use it! And thanks so much for making it Mac-compatible.

However, I have issues to ask about.
  • For starters, I’m having problems with submodels. LDView opens my file and draws it correctly without any complaints, but when LPub sends it a step containing submodel references, LDView flashes some errors, and the result appears to be missing all the submodel references. By the last step, I can at least see one of the submodels, but it appears to be positioned at (0,0,0)—definitely not where my file told it to appear.

  • I’m not seeing any options to make callouts, which is likely related to my submodel problem above. I’ve tried getting this file (made with Bricksmith) as close to MLCad’s output as I can, but it is still not recognizing them.

  • I was unable to use a file which had an ASCII single quote in the path, and also one which had a curly right single quote. I’m not sure if this was LPub, LDView, or a combination of both.

  • The default rotation angle is odd. (I was expecting a standard isometric viewing angle). I pasted in this block I’ve seen from files I made on MLCad, but it didn’t help:
0 ROTATION CENTER 0 0 0 1 “Custom”
0 ROTATION CONFIG 0 0


Some picky Mac interface issues:
  • The application shouldn’t quit when I close the document window (It would be great to have multiple documents too.) Also, Command-W should close the window.

  • Browsing for LDView and LDGLite should use the standard open/save dialogs, like the Open document command does. The browse dialog, aside from being nonstandard, does not support the full functionality of the Mac open dialog. Also, I had to navigate down to the Contents/MacOS/LDView executable instead of choosing the .app.

  • The fact that most of the page-layout functionality resided in pop-up menus took me a long time to figure out. I think I was expecting some kind of editor. Many Mac programs have “inspector” windows—little free-floating things that give you information about your current selection and let you choose commands to apply to it. An in-window area would be fine too. Something like that would improve the discoverability of the features. When functionality is available exclusively in contextual menus, many (or perhaps most) Mac users will never realize it even exists. In this case, they would get the impression that LPub is much more limited than it actually is.
Sorry for the barrage. I really am excited by your program!

Thanks again,
Allen



Message has 1 Reply:
  Re: LPub 4 Web page
 
(...) Hey, I've been out of town on business for the last two weeks..... Thanks! That will be great. (...) We talked about this privately and I'm going to fix LPub. (...) I know you were having trouble because of the LPub bug above. When you load (...) (16 years ago, 29-Jul-08, to lugnet.cad, FTX)

Message is in Reply To:
  Re: LPub 4 Web page
 
(...) Hi Allen, So, can I twist your arm to put in some of those obtuse MLCad defined meta-commands like ROTSTEP and BUFEXCHG, that we talked about at "House of Bricks"? The are vital parts of making rich building instructions. Kevin (prod, prod) (...) (16 years ago, 10-Jul-08, to lugnet.cad, FTX)

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