When PlantTracks is installed the only clue the user has (besides changes to the About dialog and the Help menu) is that a new menu entry has appeared under the Tools menu column in PlansPlus, entitled PlantTracks.... That new menu pick will load the PlantTracks dialog:
This dialog is organized into two pages: the tab Schemes is dedicated to creating plant symbol schemes, and the tab Assignments assigns plants to the schemes. These changes will be stored in the current plan so they area remembered and used whenever PlansPlus is used thereafter. Any scheme or assignments may be changed at any time by editing them in this dialog. We will discuss the schemes on this help page and the assignments on the next.
The first control is the Scheme selection control. With this control you may select for viewing or editing any of your already-existing schemes. This is done by clicking on the arrow at the right side of the box and selecting the scheme to be edited from the drop-down list. The box will not allow direct typing.
To the right of the Scheme selection control are three buttons. The first is labelled Enter a new scheme, and pressing it will start the process of adding a new scheme. First of all any existing scheme edits will be saved (a popup dialog makes that optional), and a popup requests the name of the new scheme. Enter the name; it can be any string you like - there are no restrictions, except that it cannot be tha same as any other scheme name. Click on OK to accept the new name and create the scheme, or Cancel to quit and simply return to the Scheme dialog.
The second button is labelled Delete this scheme, and it deletes the current scheme after verifying that that is really what the user wants. Of course, when a scheme is deleted, all the plants assigned to that scheme revert to the normal Punch! wheel symbol.
The third button is Rename this scheme. When you press it the name of the current scheme is displayed in the same popup dioalog used for a new name. Edit the name as desired, and again OK and Cancel are available.
Under the buttons is an open area which will hold a representation of the symbol that the current scheme builds in the plan, on the left. It will be updated as you make changes so that it reflects the way that you cam expect the final symbol to look. On the right are twelve basic plant shapes that can be selected from for a new or existing scheme (some may be unused). The first symbol is, of course, the standard Punch! wheel. Note, however, that even that shape can be made very nonstandard with the application of other of the schemes explained below, so having it available is not a waste of a shape slot. The last symbol at this writing, the ninth, is designed to be used with the pots and containers which Punch! has added to the custom plants selections. Obviously, the size chosen to use with this symbol should be a fixed size, not one that grows over time!
Below the symbols on the left is a group of controls for editing the display size of the symbol. We will defer this discussion to a later page.
Next to the Size group is color selection. Plant symbols are drawn with two colors: the line color, and the fill color (used on shapes that support fill). Pressing either of the buttons displays a color choice dialog Which contain standard Windows color selections, and a set of sixteen custom colors. Thirteen of the custom colors are filled by Punch! standard colors: The foundation drawing color, and those for the Floor, Electrical, Plumbing, Roofing, HVAC, Deck, Landscape and Detail plans, followed by the colors for the interior background, the trace-through color for other floor items and plan trace, the plan background color and the color used in ClearView lines. The last three colors are unused. The custom colors may be used as needed, and will be saved and restored the next time a PlanTracks color is needed.
Besides the two color dialog buttons is a checkbox labelled Transparent fill for setting the fill color to be transparent.
Below the color selection options is a checkbox and six entry controls. The checkbox is labelled Randomize rotation. If it is set, a random per-plant rotation angle is added to the computed angles so the symbols are not automatically aligned. This gives a more normal, chaotic look to plans with many plants on them. The left entry control is labelled Symmetry, and allows for a number from 1 to 20 to be entered. This controls the number of "sectors" in the symbol shape. The number 4 usually reflects a square, four sided shape (for example, the Punch! wheel would have four instead of twelve spokes), and 6 corresponds to a hexagonal arrangement. The final entry control is labelled Line width and also may vary from 0 to 20; 0 means hairline thickness, which is always the thinnest line that can be drawn in all cases. The line width is the thickness of the lines which draw the figure; hairline width is the default.
The other entry controls are only enabled for the fourth shape in the second row - the random leaf design. This design is formed of randomly placed leaves. The additional controls are for the Leaf size (1-20), the Leaf density (1-20) and the basic Leaf shape: broad leaf, pine needles, palm leaf and lance leaf. The random leaf pattern is, of course, different every time the screen refreshes; it will never be the same way twice, even for identical plants. Note that the media on which the patterns are represented will affect their impact. In general, the finer the media, the higher the density should be. That means that a density which complete blacks out a plant's area on the screen may look too sparse when displayed on a high resolution printer, and so the Media entry box allows for the selection of the media being targeted. It applies to all the random-leafed plants in the drawing, and will always start out at screen media when PlansPlus is started. If the user wants to print the current plan, the printer's dpi (dots per inch) specification should be entered, and the density will be raised to give a roughly equivalent view as the screen setting does for the screen view. Note that this will extend the amount of time required to repaint the screen, by up to sixteen times in the worst case.
[Note that this resolution vs. density problem is not solved in the general case by the Media control. Whenever anything is printed it will appear drawn with thinner lines on the screen for all objects (except walls). This is normally ignored or thought of as the proper way such things should work. One example of the distortion this causes: if you use a different color for the an object's outline and the fill (like leaves), then changing the media resolution will change the way the leaf looks, as the outline will be thinner than it appears to be on the screen, and the leaves will seem to shift color. The Media control does not affect this.]
All these options merely create a scheme, or change an existing one. To make it useful we need to assign it to specific plants, and for that let's flip over to the other page, but first let us touch on plant symbol sizing.
PlantTracks and the contents of this help file are
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