View Menu Items :: PowerCADD7

Question

Are there any performance suggestions you can make for PowerCADD 7? I've noticed there is a delay when I have drawings that contain lots of objects with Transparency^? and Shadow attributes.

Requirements:

PowerCADD v7 and Mac OS^? X (10.4.4) or newer recommended

Background

PowerCADD 7 is a high performance application optimized for Mac OS X. However, there is no way to predict the type of drawings everyone might be producing nor now new or old their hardware might be. With that in mind, there are a variety of View menu items settings in PowerCADD that may affect performance in your particular hardware or drawing situation. Note we say may affect performance; we really don't know but at least you can try various combinations of items to see if they actually make a difference for you.

For detailed explainations of the features and settings described below, reference your PowerCADD user manual.

What To Do

We can't guarantee anything -- but here are some things to try.

The View Menu has specific items which allow you to turn off certain types of objects in a drawing. In addition to making it easier to work on a drawing by removing visual distractions, turning off some of these items can also increase performance.

Choosing any of the following items from the View Menu will turn the designated items off or on in a drawing. The display in the View Menu will update when an item is hidden. For example, if you choose Hide Text, the status of the View Menu will change to Show Text.

• Hide Text hides all the text in a drawing.
• Hide Dimensions hides all of the dimension lines and dimension text in a drawing.
• Hide Hatches hides all of the hatches in a drawing.
• Hide Transparency makes all transparent objects in a drawing opaque.
• Hide Shadows hides all shadows in a drawing.

Note: The redraw performance of Hatch patterns has been significantly increased in PowerCADD 7.

We strongly recommend assigning a custom key command to Hide Transparency and Hide Shadows (the custom key command will toggle the item between the menu Hide/Show state). Even on a 2 Ghz dual processor PowerMac G5 tower, with 64MB of VRAM^? and 3 GB^? of RAM, there can be a measurable delay when opening or editing files that contain large number of objects with Shadow and Transparency attributes. Shadow Attributes in particular can be a significant performance draw during redraw. A custom key command (choose: PowerCADD menu > Preferences > Commands tab) will go a long way to making switching these features on and off on the fly second nature. Trust us: we use a LOT of these two attributes and have learned alot during Alpha and Beta testing of PowerCADD 7 over the past two years prior to release!

We hope that helps
caddpower.com

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