layout windows

[Mile Loveland]

I'm tired of having to reset my window layouts all the time. HELP!!!
I've deleted the gbarstate file so many times that it's getting rediculous.
I've saved the windows layout, and saved it and when i get out of pcdmis and go back in it changes the layout it's own way EVERYTIME. just upgraded from 3.5 mr2 to 3.7 mr3

PLEASE HELP.

mike

[Matthew D. Hoedeman]

Are you trying to create custom toolbars in V3.7MR3? If so, STOP, it will slime the views every time. You have to edit it in V3.5, then copy every file that is in the same directory as the gbarstate from V3.5 to V3.7, then LEAVE THE TOOLBARS alone. It really sucks, but that is the only fix I know.

[STANLEY]

Matt i'm thinking of upgraing to 3.7 mr3. What do you think of 3.7 mr3?

[Matthew D. Hoedeman]

So far, V3.7 MR3 has been fairly nice to me, but I still have not done much with it since I keep V3.5 program in V3.5, etc. It has yet to dump me out and it DOES have the 'skipped' clearance plane move fixed. My cal-tech used BOTH V3.5 and V3.7MR3 when doing my CMM on Monday, same tech, knows all my issues with Pcdmis and (even though I was not here) he checked it using both versions for me and they both agreed. I was the one who pointed it out that when V3.5 was new, and you installed it, it would NOT turn on and activate the comp map and between us we got it figured out, by calibrating in BOTH versions then as well, I caught it, we fixed it. Real nice guy. So, so far, so good with V3.7 MR3.

[STANLEY]

Thanks Matt. When things slow down for me i'm going to install 3.7 mr3 and give it a try.

[Matthew D. Hoedeman]

OH, one other thing about V3.7 MR3, and this has been kind of an on-going issue with ALL versions of Pcdmis. The RTF files look bad. In 3.7MR3 they have really messed up the column spacing. They have 'floating' column widths for the various things in the report, MEAS, NOMS, TOL, etc. and they get set to the widest value in the program. HOWEVER, the biggest screw-up is that they have the tolerance columns set for values up to 99,999.999 in metric BEFORE they will get wider for a larger tolerance (and they WILL get wider if you type in a bigger tolerance). This eats up a lot of horizontal space in the report along with the 2 (or 3) emtpy spaces that seperate the columns. Whointhehell gets that kind of tolerance, eh? As far as I am concerned, the tolerance column widths should be set to xx.xxx wide for metric programs and x.xxxxx wide for english programs. This would give you up to 1.99999" tolerance in english and almost 4 inches for a metric program. Does ANYONE get tolerances larger than that out there? If so, why don't you use a tape measure? These machines are made to check values to the micron, so why would ANY of us need that much tolerance?

Anyway, now that the rant is done, there are ways you can get around this. You can:
1) Use the Wilcox PCDMISTOEXCEL program to send the data to Excel
-OR-
2) You can save the data to Datapage and use it's MEASUREMENT report
-OR-
3) You can do something different.

I chose to do something different. I put ALL my data into Datapage. I always have. I have made my own blank 'master' Excel form. I make a data report in Datapage, save it to a TXT file, open that with Excel, copy and paste the data into my 'master' form and I am all done. Of course, there is some amount of set-up required for the Excel form to customize it for each job, but that only gets done once, after that, it is copy and paste. I then have an Excel for that, by changing the value in 1 cell, I can have a CMM report for any 1 of up to 30 parts or an AVERAGE CMM report of all the parts in the file.

So, there are lots of things you can do, you just have to find the time. When running long programs and while the 2 wedm's are running, I pretty much have 'free rein' for making my own custom forms. And with the coming of V4.0 and NO MORE 'common', easy reports (everything is now done with templates) I put a rush on this Excel form and got it done and I now use it for ALL my programs in V3.7MR3. If all you are reporting is XYZT for vector points, the RTF files that V3.7MR3 make are good enough, but when you start getting into 2-D distance, 3-D distance and some of those other things that make REAL WIDE dimensions, to gets to be a real pain in the rump.

[STANLEY]

Thanks for the input Matt.

[Wes Cisco]

toolbar workaround

The way I found to get the toolbar icons I want to save to a 3.7MR3 window layout is instead of creating a custom toolbar, just add on to one of the stock toolbars you want up. For example: I want the dimension toolbar, but there are couple of icons on it standard, that I do not use, so I removed them in, then I added a divider and then I added some of the things I use all the time like find/replace, define pattern, paste w/pattern, etc. I ended up modifing several of the standard toolbars to get an overall layout I was happy with, then I saved the layout and I have no problem. HTH

[craiger_ny]

[QUOTE=Matthew D. Hoedeman]OH, one other thing about V3.7 MR3, and this has been kind of an on-going issue with ALL versions of Pcdmis. The RTF files look bad. In 3.7MR3 they have really messed up the column spacing. They have 'floating' column widths for the various things in the report, MEAS, NOMS, TOL, etc. and they get set to the widest value in the program. HOWEVER, the biggest screw-up is that they have the tolerance columns set for values up to 99,999.999 in metric BEFORE they will get wider for a larger tolerance (and they WILL get wider if you type in a bigger tolerance). This eats up a lot of horizontal space in the report along with the 2 (or 3) emtpy spaces that seperate the columns........................................... ...............................................I chose to do something different. I put ALL my data into Datapage. I always have. I have made my own blank 'master' Excel form. I make a data report in Datapage, save it to a TXT file, open that with Excel, copy and paste the data into my 'master' form and I am all done. Of course, there is some amount of set-up required for the Excel form to customize it for each job, but that only gets done once, after that, it is copy and paste. I then have an Excel for that, by changing the value in 1 cell, I can have a CMM report for any 1 of up to 30 parts or an AVERAGE CMM report of all the parts in the file.

QUOTE]

I'm not sure I'm seeing the same problem with .rtf files (I attached one of mine). I may not know what you are talking about though. Mine are very clean, always have been. As a matter of fact they are a perfect copy of the report. But I have always stuck with the old school dimension style. Once my operators get used to something they don't want anything changed. Plus they are the super paranoid type that think printing and hoarding copies of the reports for every part they run will help them if they ever get called into court someday. So printing the old style saves me trips to IS for ink cartridges. This style of .rtf is great for use on my front ends too. I just print it to file then when my front end executes the quit method on my pcdmis object I go get the .rtf file and display it in an .rtf box on the front end (I use VB.net, I don't know if V6.0 supports .rtf text boxes). As far as the operators are concerned they are looking at PCDMIS even though they are not. Does anyone have any experience displaying .rtf files on front ends they wrote in VB that are generated by V4.0? I heard 4.0's .rtf files are all objects in them. I do not know how a VB front end handles .rtf files with objects in them. I'd like to know, maybe I'll give it a whirl.

Craig

[Matthew D. Hoedeman]

BAD REPORTS




Well, the report I saw didn't have any of the problem-type dimensions in it. One thing I noticed was that you can set the EDIT WINDOW in Pcdmis to CURIER NEW and a 10pt font and the RTF file has either a 9pt or 9.5 font size in V3.7 MR3, it does not match what YOU, the operator, told it to use. I also have included an RTF file that HAS come straight from Pcdmis, the only edits are that I deleted all but the first letter of the header (to 'protect' the customer), however it is from V3.5 (so the FONT still matches the Pcdmis font) but it shows the same problems (they have been there for QUITE a long time). I want you to look at the following in this report:

DIM D006, the 2-D distance of a circle to a circle. Notice that the 'header' line for the dimension wraps around to the next line, making an ugly looking report.

Look at DIM D014, another 2-D distance where the AXIS of the dimension, which SHOULD start a new line, actually begins after the OUTTOL, which should be the end of a line (this also appears BEFORE you do any kind of edit to the RTF file)

There are blank, empty lines at the top of pages in the unedited RTF file, right above D014 in fact.

Look at DIM D020-C and notice that it spans from one page to another and notice that the following dimension has no blank line before it starts, so at a glance, it looks like 1 dimension, not 2.

D022-F has problems as well, it spans 2 pages and has no blank line before the next dimension so that it looks like 2 different dimensions (as it is) but broken up incorrectly.

One thing that is NOT in this file that I HAVE seen is that a 2-D distance dimension between 2 points (POINTS, not a line or a circle or a cylinder) will tell you that there is NO RADIUS. Really? I thought ALL points had a radius.

I used OLD STYLE reporting for this and it saves the file using the font color of the edit window. The color is easily changed in WORD, but even WITH draft mode, it still comes out in a color (at least, it did last I knew). I don't want the MARKED things to be in BLACK, that is what the UNMARKED has been since the DOS days and the MARKED has been in another color. They have automatically assumed that we want EVERYTHING in color. I DO NOT!

This is the kind of thing that Pcdmis has had in it's repoting for so long that I can no longer remember when it was right (probably way back in the DOS days would be my guess). Now, there is V3.7MR3 which has wider columns by FAR than is reasonable needed. And, since the columns WILL get wider and set themselves to a wider value (based on the largest in the program), why did they START with what in any reasonable mind would be the MAXIMUM EVER NEEDED? Whointhehell gets 99,999.999mm of tolerance on ANYTHING? Or even 999.999mm of tolerance. That right there is a minimum of 3 extra spaces and when you multiply that by 6 columns, that is 18 extra spaces that have to be squeezed onto 1 line of an 8.5x11" sheet of paper.

Also, the 'default' report? Try to print it out and get it in a 3-ring binder WITHOUT punching holes through dimensions and also still be able to SEE the dimensions, you can't.

[craiger_ny]

I see what you are saying Matt. Although the report I posted is V3.7 MR3. I have yet to have some of these things come up. Some differences on my end are I am in 9pt font. I never dimension distance, I know it is more code but I align then do location, got burned way back and stopped using distance. I am going to try and generate some garbage reports here though becasuse I need to know what potential issues I may be in for. Maybe I have just gotten lucky that my conventions have kept me away from some of these things. By the way I ran one of my front end applications and droped your report into my pcdmisw folder to make my application think it was generated by pcdmis and then display it and it kept the same garbage format when it was displayed in the .rtf text box so I have incentive to try and make sure I do not run into these issues.

You do know you can change the edit window colors to make marked and unmarked features the color of your liking right?

In regards to radius issue, a point is infintesmally small, it has no radius. No radius means you are not using the add radius or subtract radius method of dimensioning, you are dimensioning center-to-center. The only time I use the distance dimension is when I need the add radius or subtract radius method. Add radius adds the feature radius (if it is a feature with a radius ie circle) to the dimension. With this you can dimension the distance from the outside edge of a circle to the outside edge of another circle (add radius method) instead of dimensioning center to center. Opposite for subtract radius. That is about the only thing I like about dimension distance and the only time I use it. Thanks for the report, I just went to 3.7 within the last year so I need to know what kind of things to test and look out for.

Craig

[Matthew D. Hoedeman]

EXCEL ROCKS

Yep, I know about the colors, but BLACK is UNMARKED, the yucky green is marked and RED is 'bad'.

Black has always been (to me) the 'neutral' color that does nothing (thus, un-marked).

When Pcdmis does 2-D (or 3-D) distances (not my choice, customer requirement, MY choice is XYZ-TS locations of points) it automatically always puts in the radius stuff, even if the features are points and have no radius to work with. It's just little things like that that get under the skin and irritate the heck out of ya. ALWAYS having to edit a RTF file if you are going to send it to a customer so that HE doesn't get lost trying to find one dimension out of the hundreds and being able to actually see that it is 1 dimension not 2 'glued' together.

I have yet to find a font that can be read without a magnifying glass that will get these outrageous widths-of-line onto a single line in a report. Now some of us (myself included) are getting a little old and the smaller the print, the harder it is to read, I don't want to have to keep making it smaller and smaller just to fit all that garbage on one line. This is what EVERY report of mine will look like using the Excel form I have made, each and every feature can report up to 5 axis (99.99999% of my stuff uses 5 or less, I can't even remember the last time I needed more) but each will always show 5 axis, no width problems then, and all I have to do is copy and paste. No more editing each and every file to fix the margin, spacing, pages, etc., etc., etc. And, I think it looks better than the Pcdmis files ever did (my opinion) and there is even BIG BOLD TEXT telling the, er, not-so-smart if the point is IN or OUT of tolerance.

[craiger_ny]

I like that one. Have you ever tried writting a macro to do that for you. You can also write to a text file directly then import into excel. My guess is that would be a lot of coding depending on how you want to report and what you want the report to look like but it might be worth screwing with, worst case you end up learning a few things. I did not give the possibilty of you having to present this to customers a thought. The company I work for designs their own product. I used to work for an aircraft manufacturer that did contract stuff and I remember the days of sending reports to Boeing and Sikorski, and Gruman. I forgot all about that.

Craig