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Lack of focus on markups addressed in future versions?

6 REPLIES 6
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Message 1 of 7
ericcand
525 Views, 6 Replies

Lack of focus on markups addressed in future versions?

Hi,

We just started using "Freestyle"/"Project Cooper" since we do a lot of markups on existing drawings. The whole idea was to give our guys tablets so that they could make the necessary changes and then pass it back to our documentation team to have it organized and fixed up.

I've found it lacks a lot on the pen interactivity for "doodling". For one, when I try to change the doodle tool option from "Rough<--->Smooth" it crashes when I try to apply, but that's not necessarily the worst of it.

Why doesn't it work more like when you write inside of Win7's tablet PC text input tool, or like the Windows Journal under Accessories->Tablet PC? There's a huge lag when you lift the pen from the surface and put it back down such that trying to write quickly is nigh impossible in Project Cooper compared to most any other tablet PC app.

Is this something that you guys are looking to address? I know that we're not the only business who would love to hand these out to designers and have them do markups and references all over the document in their chicken scratch.


-Eric
6 REPLIES 6
Message 2 of 7
crounsl
in reply to: ericcand

hi Eric -

Thanks for posting this. This is actually the first feedback that we've received on tablet behavior like this. Like you, we believe that this product has great potential on the tablet so we are eager to see it work well in that environment.

Can you tell us a bit more about the hardware that you have so that we ca research this more fully? (actually, hardware/operating system/memory/etc iformation would be ideal)

Lisa

Lisa Crounse
Product Manager - AutoCAD Freestyle Technology Preview


Lisa Crounse
Sr. Product Manager
Message 3 of 7
ericcand
in reply to: ericcand

Hi Lisa,

We've tried it with a bit of different hardware to see if we could get different results (ie. if this was a software design or a hardware limitation). We experienced it in both cases but perhaps you can lend some suggestions based on the hardware specifications.

The first machine was a desktop hooked up via VGA and using a Wacom Intuos4 tablet as input with these specs:

Asus P5Q motherboard
4 GB RAM
Core2Duo E4600 @ 2.4ghz
Nvidia 8500GT video card
Windows 7 Professional X64

The other machine was a Toshiba Tablet PC running significantly slower hardware, but obviously with the built in digitizer. I don't have it in front of me at the moment but it's fair to say it wasn't a very quick machine as it's several years old. The Toshiba Tablet was running Windows 7 Professional x86.

We did observe very similar behaviour on both machines though which surprised me. It didn't seem as though the "doodling" was any more responsive on the first machine than the second when lifting (ending a motion) and putting back down (starting a new motion).

I don't know if this is something you have also witnessed or if it may be something particular to our setup, but it definitely makes it difficult to write notes quickly onto drawings. It will work fine if we write slowly, but that's not ideal.

Do you have any software or hardware change suggestions that might improve the responsiveness problems we're experiencing?
Message 4 of 7
GrumpyGrizzly
in reply to: ericcand

I checked out the doodling tool the other night on my laptop and it was like drawing a multisegmented polyline in Autocad and then when you were done, it would spline it for you. To be able to do something like signing your name, that ain't gonna happen with what I experienced.

If it's only going to be a redline tool, why not just stick with Autodesk Design Review? It's free and comes with all Autodesk packages these days. What's going to make Freestyle different?

Hopefully, as I mentioned in my first posting, it will be useable on low system resource machines like Netbooks but, I guess we'll see where that ends up.

Paul Jordan
Cad Administrator
Southland Industries
Message 5 of 7
ericcand
in reply to: ericcand

The problem I have with Design Review is that I need to be able to keep it in .DWG format the entire time. I can't even save as .DWG in Design Review, and it converts a file immediately when it's opened.

Do you have any suggestions for this?
Message 6 of 7
lundbea
in reply to: ericcand

Hi,
What about publishing the DWG to DWF then marking up in Design Review then importing the markups back into AutoCAD? Is that an applicable workflow and would this solve your problem?
Message 7 of 7
GrumpyGrizzly
in reply to: ericcand

Here's the trick with Design Review. Try and open a .dwg file and it should come up with a message that says you need to download TrueView (90+mb program, also free) to view .dwg files. Once that's installed, you should be able to open a .dwg with Design Review and I would think you could redline it and then save a file that can be brought into your original Autocad file.

Kind of a twisted way around but, once you've installed TrueView, it's pretty much seamless.

Hope that helps,

Paul Jordan

I have to make one change on this post.. The trueview 64 bit version is 183mb, not 90+.. Well, I guess 183 is 90+ so I was kinda close..

Edited by: GrumpyGrizzly on Mar 24, 2010 9:01 PM

Hmmm.. It appears the functionality has gone away that would let you open .dwg files in Design Review after installing True View. At least I haven't found how to do it on 2010 as of yet. It looks like they want you to open the .dwg in TrueView, then save it as a .dwf, then open it in Design Review to redline it. Then you're stuck with a .dwf to send back to the office.

Actually, I can't even export a .dwg file back to a .dxf. It looks like it does it but, nothing shows up.. Edited by: GrumpyGrizzly on Mar 24, 2010 10:45 PM

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