In the main we have striven to make PlansPlus reflect exactly the world that the Punch! user has created, except where we have added functionality. There is one such final area that needs a bit of explanation.
First, a minor point in style: to the left is a comparison of dimension line styles in which Punch! and Dimensions in Detail differ.
When walls are displayed they are optionally auto-dimensioned - that is, the program automatically adds the dimensional length of the wall to the display. It even adds two such lengths when there are doors or windows in the wall - one overall length and the individual lengths of the door/window centerlines along the wall. PlansPlus does that just as Punch! does.
Background: There are essentially two classes of wall joins: there are glommed walls, where the end of one wall is joined permanently to an end of the next wall, so that they necessarily have a single common end-point, and there are other joins, where the end of a wall is simply parked in the vicinity of the middle or the end of another wall. Glommed walls can only join end-to-end, one-to-one, and may (but don't have to) form a loop or cycle of walls. The exterior wallset is such a loop, required to be a loop in order to make certain Punch! features work. Also, auto-dimensions may track the center of the wall they measure, or either of the wall surfaces (it can be switched from one side to the other by option on a wall-by-wall basis). For the purposes of this discussion a wall participates in an unglommed join if the endpoint is within the wall's half-thickness of the centerline or endpoints of another wall.
Punch!'s auto-dimensions are not accurate in certain cases:
PlansPlus was specifically engineered to correct these problems. All wall dimensions, around glommed or non-glommed joins, are correctly measured, and the joins, glommed or not, are correctly drawn, as long as the two walls converge at an angle of greater than five degrees. At this writing, there is one additional problem remaining in PlansPlus, as demonstrated on the left. The wall dimension that has a non-glommed join in the middle of it ignores it. This is not an inaccuracy (the dimension is correct), but it is not what a user would expect, and will be fixed in a future update).
In some cases, where an unconnected wall end is too close to another wall, the algorithm that computes the embedment of walls cannot properly interpret the situation, and causes the walls to be inappropriately changed, as is the case with the drawing on the right. Note that this case could very well indicate incorrect drawing practices; in the case shown, the wall should be joined into a wallset. However, if this is a problem, the embedment algorithm described above can be disabled to provide essentially the same results as Punch! with the menu pick Options->Disable Wall Embedment.
PlansPlus and the contents of this help file are
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