RealCADD and iPocket Draw

I don't get scaling, at all. I don't need 1/50 as a default, since most of what I build is about 12 feet wide, and 8 feet high. When I start by drawing a rectangle, and specify the size at 36 inches by 96 inches, it appears on my screen at about 1/4 inch by 1/2 inch. When I zoom in, the line gets thicker. I don't want that!

If I draw a parallel line and specify to move it 12 inches (once I figure out the damn parallels dialogue), it moves less than that, and the scale again says 1/50. I can't find anywhere to set a different default, either.

The way my old program worked was this: I drew a box, and specified the size of that box. I fit it to the screen with CMD+F. I kept working on it, and everything was that scale. I didn't even need to know what the scale was. I could add sections, zoom in or out, whatever I wanted, and CMD+F would resize and recenter it. When I was ready to print, Drawing Size would show me my drawing, with an outline of an 8 x 12 sheet. A simple FIT command would rescale everything to fit on the paper, while keeping line thickness, text, and dimensions correct.

(You might well ask, then why don't you keep using that program? Because it no longer runs on Mac, and the upgrade to the company's current product is about $2000. I can still run it in Windows, but that's a bit of a pain. But maybe, not as much of a pain as the frustration I'm dealing with.)

This just doesn't make sense to me. Am I doing something wrong? Am I unclear on the concept? Am I just too dumb to use this program?

If I sound frustrated, I am. And I can't find anywhere to get help, except for iphone screen videos.

Scaling is really quite straightforward. In this program (like many other mac programs, especially traditional ones like MacDraw or ClarisCad) you select a scale so that the drawing will fit the page you are going to print it on. You select the scale on the Window-Layers/Pages.

So if you are going to print the final drawing on 11" x 17", then you select a scale that will get your object to fit a piece of paper that size. I do a lot of drawings on this size paper and usually 1:10 or 1:15 are good scales for boats up to about 6.000m – I do everything metric, but the same principal applies to american units. Then for detail, I usually draw on a second layer set to scale 1:2, and sometimes for intermediate detail I will use another layer set to 1:5. You can move around between layers very easily on the Window-Layers/pages menu.

When you copy and paste objects from a drawing at a different scale (a 1:15 object say, to a 1:10 drawing) the pasted object will carry its scale from the original drawing. If you select the pasted object you will see that in the Window-Edit menu that floats on the screen. With the object selected you can change its scale to the scale you want it be be at – but of course it will be dimensionally bigger or smaller than it really is. You fix this by selecting the object and using Actions-Scale menu – for 1:15 to 1:10 you would multiply both X and Y by 1.5. You can scale the text too if you want –mostly I don't want to do this. You can specify very detailed scale factors – I don't think there is any real limitations to the numbers of the number after the decimal point – so you can deal with very odd conversions (like from ClarisCad which converts a metric drawing to DXF with american units and so even when you select a scale when opening the DXF conversion, you get a pretty odd result, including the text sizes).

It may sound a little complicated when written down but in practice it is very quick and easy to do.

ClarisCad had a preferences option to paste objects from a different scale drawing and automatically have them scale themselves to the scale of the drawing they are being pasted to. Which was very useful and cut out a couple of steps.

Personally I do not like being forced to draw at 1:1 (like in TurboCad for example) and then have the program scale it all when I go to Print. Partly because the text sizes can get pretty stupid and more importantly because all my stuff is sold as an online download, and the client prints it, or whatever parts of it he/she wants. So paper size is very important. And I save the drawings as PDF and a lot of computers won't open a really big PDF (I've never quite understood why). With CNC files I draw at 1:1 because the CNC machine is going to cut directly from the files and at full size. So for a 60' yacht, say, the drawing is at least 60' long. But for the PDF visual of the DXF file, I scale them to 1:10, including scaling the text (on the full size drawing my text is 90, so that scales nicely to 9 on the PDF's).

I draw everything at line size 0.01 pixels, so scaling doesn't have any practical effect. A few things like borders around the drawing, I use 0.5 pixels, but that's about all. That's because RealCADD line sizes are specified in pixels and when you scale, you have the same number of pixels, just bigger or smaller. Line sizes in mm would be good, then thicker lines would stay the same thickness whatever the scaling factor, which they don't now.

Again, hope this helps!

George

George, that helps a bunch. Although I'm not building boats, that 6 meter (19+feet) is just about right for me, as well.

So I open a new drawing, and immediately set the scale to 1:10. All the lines follow that scale. I'm a happy puppy!

Is there a way to set that as a default?

Thanks,

Mike

Mikerosen wrote:Is there a way to set that as a default?

Yes by default the scale of a new drawing is the same as this of the last drawing closed.

OK, thanks!