Released June, 2015
Before release 5.0, Dimension supported a small set of standard symbols plus the ability to add a collection of additional symbols. Adding a collection was NOT user-friendly. The symbols are stored as 32×32 monochrome bitmaps. They are drawn using the point color.
Release 5.0 adds these enhancements:
An option was added to draw a leader line from a measurement point to the description/quantity display. One end of the line would be a measurement point. By default that is the first point. If you right-click on a point, there is a context menu option “Draw leader to this point”. The second point of the leader would be:
Prior to release 5.0 the point color was used to draw point symbols, point text and the description/quantity display. Now a separate color button has been added for the point text and description/quantity display. This would be used to draw the text at each point, the description/quantity text and the leader line.
You can now display run measurements with arcs for the lines between the points. (The “Create Arc” functionality wouldn’t work because you don’t want intermediate points.) A new Trace property is a “Curved” checkbox. If this is checked the lines will be drawn with the default arc (Drawing tab of the User Preferences). When editing points for a measurement, the user can drag the individual arcs to the desired curvature.
We have added a field “Created By” for measurements and annotations. This is set to the User ID when a measurement or annotations is created.
To review “created by” in the measurement list, you can add the column.
To review the “created by” graphically, a new control “Filtering” was be added to the control panel. The heading includes these controls:
The body of the control is a list of filter descriptions on the left and a drop-down list of possible values on the right. “<all>” is included in the possible values.
A separate color option has been added for annotation text. The color is set via a button in the description dialog. You can press that button to specify the color for the annotation text. This dialog is used by pattern search area annotations and text annotations
A “Copy Window” is now available when editing standard extensions. This window allows you to browse through the variables for existing extensions and copy variables to the extension you’re working on.
Search capability has been added to the Standard Extension List Window. This allows you to find extensions based on text in the extension or its variables.
A “Paste” button has been added to the Extension Drop-down List Properties Window. Drop-down rows can now be transferred from Excel or any other applications that can copy CSV data to the clipboard. The data should be in 2 columns. The first is the row description. The second is the row value. Select the two columns for the desired rows in the CSV application and copy them to the clipboard. In the Extension Drop-down List Properties Window, simply press the “Paste” button. The rows will be added to the end of the list.
A new control in the control panel allows you to name and save views. Then you can quickly open them in the main window or in an extra drawing window.
You can now do Quick Takeoff from extra drawing windows. This allows you to get dimensions from drawings other than the one in the main window.
A user wanted to easily draw multiple straight lines from a common hub point to multiple end points. This is useful in low voltage wiring where the wires can go in a straight line. We implemented the following solution:
Many times, the lines are being drawn to points that are part of an existing count measurement. For example they might count all the security cameras for a floor then want to digitize wire runs from a control center to each camera. They can do that as follows:
A button has been added to the batch print selection dialog to select all drawings that have measurements or annotations. Drawings with measurements or annotations are displayed with a bold font.
A new calculated variable “LineLen” has been added. It provides the total length of all the separating lines passing through the measurement area (both horizontal and vertical). Imagine an irregularly shaped concrete surface divided by a crisscross of saw cuts. This would be the total length of the saw cuts.