I do have a number of questions regarding efficiently using ViaCAD. I'll pose the questions with a specific sort of quite simple 2D drawings which I need from time to time, namely track layout of railroad stations. A simple drawing of that sort can be seen here (it is used in my website of Austrian railroad interlockings).

I started out with creating the symbols seen in the diagram (indicating semaphore signals for those who are interested). I ran into a number of usability problems - I hope someone can tell me how to use ViaCAD better.

Here is a first, very simple symbol (for a single-arm semaphore):



This blog entry and the video linked there give some hints how to create nice symbols with associated previews. In contrast to what can be seen in the video, ViaCAD9 now apparently has a "Save as Symbol..." menu item, which seemed nice ... until I tried it. As explained in the video, I resized the window to a nice preview size ...



... and did "Save as Symbol...". Unexpectedly, the window was resized ...



... and my symbol preview came out thus:



Not what I expected. I reverted to the method from the video (straight "Save As" into the symbol folder), and now it works:



Question 1: Is "Save as Symbol" buggy, or did I something wrong?

The next problem I have is creating aligned symbol previews. From the previous symbol, I created another one (two-armed semaphore):



During drawing, I resized the drawing window, and so I ended up with not quite the same drawing window to create my preview. Fortunately, I had remembered the rough grid size of the preview-creating view ... but setting up the drawing window to that size proved to be difficult. What I wanted was a window with the corners at the locations indicated in red ...



... but when I resized the window, the drawing inside started to change its size, and the red points escaped me.

Question 2: Is there some option that prevents these size changes when resizing the drawing window? If not, what's an easy and reliable way to get a drawing window of a defined size so that the symbol previews end up aligned?

With some geometric understanding (resize so that the red dots are on the diagonal of the drawing window and the "Zoom Window"), I tricked the drawing into the size I wanted. I now could create three nicely aligned previews:



Now I wanted to drop one of the symbols into my drawing. I had drawn the symbol exactly at the origin, as can be seen here:



I wanted to pull it in so that its "foot" (the origin) would be at the center of the green circle show here:



I nicely honed my cursor in on the circle's center ...



... and ... ended up with this:



Question 3: What did I wrong?? It seems that the "anchor point" of the symbol is at some completely different point than the origin. Unfortunately, neither in the blog post nor in the video mentioned above, nor in the User's Manual could I find anything about "anchor points of symbols" ...

Thanks a lot for any enlightenment!
Harald M.

Edited by user Sunday, September 28, 2014 7:21:25 AM(UTC)  | Reason: Typos...

Unfortunately, I have found out that ViaCAD 9 has a serious bug in connection with custom symbols, which makes it quite unusable.
Here is how to recreate the bug:

1. Start ViaCAD 9
2. Switch on "Show grid"
3. Create a new symbol, e.g. by drawing two lines that cross each other
4. "Save as Symbol ..." (save it as a user symbol)
5. Close the file

6. Open a new diagram
7. Open the concept explorer and go to symbols
8. Pull in the newly created symbol

The symbol will show up at totally erratic places (even changing with each new diagram). When one switches on "Show points (Ctrl-D)", the one can see that there is a random boundary around the symbol that is much larger than the symbol itself.

If one leaves out step 2. (the grid), the symbol comes out as expected. However, drawing precise symbols without a grid is much more work and should not be necessary to create usable symbols.

Regards
Harald M.

// Edit: A little more information on what happens:
* It is not necessary to draw the symbol using the grid - it suffices to switch on the grid on and off once during construction of the symbol to corrupt the symbol file.
* The resulting symbol is very weird: In addition to the random extent, it contains a line and a huge circle (or segment?) that get pulled into the drawing with the symbol.

Here is the symbol during creation:



Here you can see what it looks like after I have pulled it to the origin of a new, completely empty drawing - note the additional line from the origin to the right:



Here you can see what it looks like when zooming out quite a lot - the actual symbol is the tiny speck near the origin:

Edited by user Wednesday, October 1, 2014 12:46:52 PM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Thanks a lot!

Newbie question: Is it possible for me to get such a corrected build from somewhere?

Regards
Harald M.