Hi to everybody in the forum. I finally got past the stage of testing and have my SpaceClaim 2009 license now. First thing I need, before producing drawings I give to clients and suppliers, is set up a proper drawing layout and templates. What is the secret behind the template files that come with SpaceClaim? I live in Germany, Europe, and we use the A4, A3, A2 and A0 paper sizes all the time. Now, I want to create templates that carry our company logo, of course, fill out their text fields automatically wherever possible and also adapt to the above mentioned paper sizes the way the factory-made templates do. I understand the automatic text fields, but I have difficulties understanding the logic behind dynamically positioning the title block items on the sheet. Is there a step by step guide, tutorial or such? I did not yet find any. Martin Kopplow

 Hello Martin,

 To begin with I would suggest checking out the Importing Drawing Formats tutorial. That should help to guide you through the basic steps of creating a custom drawing format, including adding these to the format library.

In addition to this, you can add Associative Notes to your formats, as you mentioned, to each of your custom formats, allowing you to position the field only once on the master format document.

I hope this helps, but if you have other questions, I'd be happy to help further.

Regards,

James Saunders

Hello James,

I found out about the library and successfully added some new formats. As I have no format to import, because I cannot export them properly from the other application I have, I drew some new ones instead. For now, I made one for every paper size commonly used here. That's working so far, but is not yet perfect. It appears the Associative Notes are the thing I need to look in a bit deeper.

Regards,

Martin

I found out about the reason for the lost text format in my previous messages.

It is the browser: Opera on Mac seems to do that, if I use Firefox instead, it's OK.

Sorry for any inconveniences. 

Martin

 Helo Martin,

Thanks for the update on the forum formatting issue; I will let the webmaster know about the lack of Opera support.

 Regards,

James Saunders

Can someone please post a guide here (or better still a 'How To' in the tutorials section on using associative notes. Like Martin, I'm having trouble getting my head around this.

I've now purchased Spaceclaim and I'm in the process of setting up various clients standard border templates so that I can use them in SC. I've followed the video tutorial on putting new templates in the library and that has worked fine.

I'm now trying to populate the border title blocks with associative text. I add a 'note' text block, right click to change this to an associative note and adjust the text size as well (the latter seems very hit and miss - selecting from the drop-down list has no effect on text size and placing the cursor in the text box response doesn't feel 'positive').

When I change the note to associative text, I get a popup giving me a list of fields to choose from. For some of my drawinig borders, the list doesn't include what I need. Can I create a custom field and add it to the list? For other existing fields, like 'Description' or 'Title' for example, I can place the box, but once I deselect it, it can't be seen and I can't work out how to access it. Is there a way of calling all of the associative text fields oncethey have been place to enable me to complete them (something like 'Form' in Excel comes to mind)?

Some of the associative text fields (such as Date and Paper Format) work fine, though they do seem a little clunky and sluggish to respond to mouse clicks and keyboard inputs.