PlansPlus is at one and the same time a powerful addition to the Punch! PowerTool suite and the basis for many more "MicroTools" to follow.
Flowing from its chronological parent, the Precision PowerTool, PlansPlus retains many of that tool's features: it has Precision 1.1.1's window interface, and its export and printing facilities. Like Precision 1.1.1, it displays the same plan in it's window as is on the main Punch! plan window - most of the same menu choices, tools and display capabilities are there. The plan is display-only; it cannot be edited or changed except in special ways that are discussed below. In addition to that, Precision's unique print and export facilities remain in PlansPlus. You can scope your output, by selecting to print or export an entire floor's plan, or a selected rectangular area of the plan, or that part of the plan that currently appears in PlansPlus's display window. If you are printing your plan you can then size your plan to fit on a single page of output, or you can have it printed at a definite scale factor. In this latter case it will print as many pages of output are needed to disdplay the current plan.
Precision's printing capabilities are mirrored in PlansPlus's export. Not only can you scope your export, but you can select the resolution that it is reproduced at, as well. You can select from three different file formats: bitmaps (.bmp), extended metafile (.emf) and portable network graphics (.png). Each has it's uses, and you can tailor your output to match them. Bitmaps are universally useful and so common that almost all image programs can use them. Portable network graphics, like .gif and .jpg files, are compressed, and also cam be used directly on the world wide web. Extended metafiles are vector, rather than raster, oriented, so it is possible to not have to determine the resolution of the output until the file is displayed. With a metafile you can create a graphic file which is in as much detail as the user, not the producer, requires.
To round out these capabilities, PlansPlus also has Precision's scale setting abilities. Not only are the four most used english and metric scale values available, but a raft of hobbyist scales (e.g., "HO" scale railroad modelers), and a custom setting, where any desired scale can be established.
As we've said, these capabilities are derived from PlansPlus's ancestral PowerTool, Precision. If that were all the PlansPlus had going for it, that would be nice, though not as powerful, as Precision is. However, that's not all that PlansPlus can do.
One of the basic problems with Punch!'s PowerTool scheme, powerful as it is, is that there is no way to merge the capabilities of two or more PowerTools into one. For example, at a user's suggestion TKE is planning a tool that will allow the user to select the shapes displayed for plants on the landscape plan, enhancing Punch!'s wheel shape. Suppose you wanted to use that tool along with Precision for its ability to display dimensions in millimeters, and you wanted to print out such a plan incorporating both. If such a plant drawing tool were available as a PowerTool, you could buy both, but you still could not use them together. From a software point of view these two tools are 99% the same - they both draw plans and they both allow for printing and export, but each with a different twist. As a software vendor TKE could, of course, offer a third PowerTool that has both capabilities, but if there are three or four or more possible combinations... I'm sure you can see the problems, and the costs involved in such an approach.
PlansPlus, however, can overcome that problem. It has the ability to add on small plugins in it's own right which can provide capabilities. All the plugins can live in the single PowerTool PlansPlus together, thus being simultaneously available. As an added benefit, PlansPlus MicroTools are easier to program, and thus may be brought to market faster than full PowerTools, for lower cost. MicroTools will be priced much lower than comparable PowerTools, even with greater combined capabilities. Finally, MicroTools, once installed, will be automatically loaded when the PlansPlus PowerTool is loaded, and will thereafter always just be there, requiring no separate loading or maintenance. Like PowerTools, MicroTools can and will be updated.
This implementation of "MicroTools" starts out with none other than "Precision", which will make PlansPlus as fully capable as the earlier PowerTool version of Precision has been. Precision will add to PlansPlus the ability to format dimensions in hundreds of different format combinations, incorporating english and metric, fractional and decimal, inches or feet and inches, rounding to a decimal or fractional level, or to metric modules, all as you need them to be. We have decided, in order to alleviate confusion with all these objects, to name the Precision MicroTool "Dimensions in Detail". We feel this name is actually better than the old name as it better fits the MicroTool's function.
PlansPlus and the contents of this help file are
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