When you click on the PlansPlus PowerTool icon the PlansPlus window is drawn. It closely resembles the Punch! plan window, and will be drawn with the current plan displayed. This window will be drawn large on the screen but not maximized. You can easily maximize it, if you desire, by clicking on the usual Windows maximize button in the upper right corner.
The PlansPlus window is like the Punch! plan window in a lot of respects. All the menu functions that affect the way data is displayed on the window are present in the menu bar, including setting the current floor and plan to be viewed. The Punch! style plan tabs are present, as well as similar tabs for the floors (called "levels" in PlansPlus). There are three additional buttons in the tab line, labelled Zoom, Move and Pointer - they replace, respectively, the zoom (spyglass), move (hand) and pointer (cursor arrow) tool buttons on the left of the plan window, and operate in an identical fashion. The lot size snap properties can be set just as they may in the Punch! plan window. The main difference between the plan window and the PlansPlus window is that in PlansPlus the data usually may not be edited. Sometimes objects cannot be selected, and therefore cannot be changed in shape or size. The purpose of the PlansPlus window is for viewing and exporting only [but some newer functions allow for limited editing to be done].
Note the status bar at the bottom of the PlansPlus window. There are three parts to it. The first part tells the user what floor and what plan are currently being viewed. The middle part displays the size of the last selection rectangle that was drawn, in the scaled units of the plan. The final section states what the scale of the current view is; it displays the selected drawing scale, the current zoom factor, and the effective scale of the screen as a result of both the former parameters combined.
Some of the GUI conventions from Punch! have changed: for example, the including of one plan's content in another plan (say, being able to see the deck items on the floor plan) is implemented in Punch! with drop down menus from the tab buttons; in PlansPlus, it's done with the submenus from View->View on xyz Plan....
Six of the dialogs that are available in the Plan window in Punch! are available in PlansPlus as well, but the procedures surrounding the use of print and export capabilities have been changed somewhat. Two of them will be discussed here; the others are discussed in the Punch! documentation of it's equivalent options.
This dialog has the same functionality as a pair of tabbed property sheets in Punch! do. In addition, the dialog also gives the user a control over the amount of movement that occurs when one of the scrollbar endcap buttons (the ones with the small arrowheads [< > v ^] in them). The values are set in terms of the scaled inches or millimeters on the plan, and defaults to 50 inches in either direction.
The sharp of mind will see that the Grid Properties dialog have the Grid Snap lengths available for editing, and will realize that changing these values will have no effect on Precision, and that person is right - they don't. Those fields are there for possible use in a future PowerTool.
The second dialog changed is the Scale dialog:
Note that this dialog has changed in a several ways. First of all there are more choices for the scale factor than have been available previously - there is a selection of hobbiest scales, and thgere are the scales that are commonly found on architect's and engineer's scale drawing instruments. There is also a "custom" scale selection which allows the user to actually input an arbitrary scale factor. There are included four read-only displays that show the scale factor displayed in terms of how much distance is equivalent to a foot (and meter) scaled distance, and one for what the scaled distance is equivalent to an inch on the plan. The final box gives the true ration between distance on the model versus the scaled distance. Secondly, further down the dialog is a place to enter the zoom factor, so this dialog fills both needs, for scale factor entry and for manual zoom entry (the View->Set Plan View Zoom... also calls this same Scale dialog). The reason they have been placed together is because they are very closely linked functionally in Punch! and PlansPlus.
The Punch! screen, and the PlansPlus screen as well, are scaled by both the scale factor and the zoom. The scale factor, which is usually denoted by a fraction like 1/24 or 1/50 indicating the relative size of the drawing to the drawn object. Roughly one inch on the screen will correspond to 50 inches on the ground. (I say "roughly" here not because they aren't accurately rendered, but because they assume a nominal value of 72 pixels per inch on the screen, which is only an approximation and varies with monitor, screen resolution and related hardware settings.) The zoom factor is a percentage that also applies; it may vary from about 5% to 300%. For example, a scale factor of 1/24 at 50% is the same as a scale factor of 1/48 at 100%. The difference is that the scale factor can only be changed on the scale factor dialog; the zoom can be changed by the mouse wheel and/or the zoom button. The scale factor is used exclusively in setting the printing scale, where the zoom setting has no effect.
Since the two values are multiplied together to set the screen resolution, it makes sense that they should be manipulated together. In fact, PlansPlus displays a combined scale factor in the status bar which takes both the scale and the zoom into account to give an effective "combined" scale factor. Keep in mind that this factor applies to the screen only, and is approximate: it assumes a screen density of 72 dots per inch, which is an assumed, nominal but not always accurate value.
PlansPlus and the contents of this help file are
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