Perimeter lines popping in and out of existence!

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MJN
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Perimeter lines popping in and out of existence!

Post by MJN »

Hello,

I recently upgraded to the newest version but I don't know if this has any relations.

I do precast concrete quantity take off's with the Editor and I will try and describe the problem before going through the hassle of uploading screenshots:

-I used Perimeter to mark the walls of a building
-I copied those Perimeter lines to subsequent pages where the layout match
-I Split the pages where several floor plans are placed on the same page (to facilitate sorting by floor levels in EXCEL following an Export)

Now, I was getting ready to perform the Export when something seemed off -like there were way too many outer wall Perimeter lines in my Comments Pane when comparing them to the size of the building.

When I scrolled through the outer walls in my Comments Pane to verify, the Selection Box started jumping to weird locations where nothing was onscreen! I looked at my Opacity levels to see if I'd turned something off, but it was on 80%.
Only when using the mouse to manually drag the invisible Perimeter line a short distance and letting go, did the color, yellow as it were, appear!?

I can't drag a Selection Box around them or select them in the document -only when choosen in the Comments Pane and moved manually do they appear to retain normal properties.

This has got me really worried about recent quotations I've sent to clients :shock:

Any help will be much appreciated…
Thanks in advance,

//MJN
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Dimitar - Tracker Supp
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Re: Perimeter lines popping in and out of existence!

Post by Dimitar - Tracker Supp »

Hello MJN,

I understand your worry. The described behavior of our Editor is indeed strange.

We didn't face such a problem before so I could not tell you what is the reason for this issue for the moment.

Unfortunately, I will need to ask you for some screenshots of what you have seen, if this is possible?

If the documents contain something confidential, please send the screenshots to: support@pdf-xchange.com

Also, please confirm that you are using the latest 8.0.334.0 version.


Regards.
MJN
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Re: Perimeter lines popping in and out of existence!

Post by MJN »

Hey Dimitar and thanks for your reply,

I may have found the culprit because I've duplicated the behavior, though it is not consistent.

I believe the problems lies in Splitting the page after marking the walls of the building: In some instances, but strangely enough not in all, the Editor copies the Perimeter lines of the first page in the Split and places them on the last page!

And in some instances the Perimeter lines are placed invisible in the paper space on the new page (where you'd have to drag them a short distance before appearing) and in other instances they are placed as visible, but outside the paper (in the grey area) -Resizing the page with a larger format reveals the Perimeter lines.

When I have some time on my hand I will try Splitting some already done drawings and test my hypothesis!
MJN
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Re: Perimeter lines popping in and out of existence!

Post by MJN »

Oh and I am using Version 8.0 build 334.0...
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Dimitar - Tracker Supp
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Re: Perimeter lines popping in and out of existence!

Post by Dimitar - Tracker Supp »

Hello MJN,

Please do let me know what you have discovered.



Regards.
MJN
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Re: Perimeter lines popping in and out of existence!

Post by MJN »

My colleagues are now reporting similar issues when Splitting pages after marking walls with Perimeter lines: the Editor seems to copy the lines to several of the new pages but I can't seem to detect a discernible pattern.

This is a pretty serious issue for us when doing take offs based on the Perimeter lines if we cannot trust what we export...
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Dimitar - Tracker Supp
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Re: Perimeter lines popping in and out of existence!

Post by Dimitar - Tracker Supp »

Hello MJN,

Since I can't reproduce such behavior at my end, Is it possible to make a video in which the problem is visible?


Regards.
MJN
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Re: Perimeter lines popping in and out of existence!

Post by MJN »

Well, I will try and find the time!
MJN
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Re: Perimeter lines popping in and out of existence!

Post by MJN »

So, I took the time :)

Attached is a short video showcasing what's up. I look forward to see what you make of this...

Thank you,

//MJN
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TrackerSupp-Daniel
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Re: Perimeter lines popping in and out of existence!

Post by TrackerSupp-Daniel »

Hello MJN,

It seems that your video was not attached, it may have been too large of an attachment. Could I ask you to try sending us a link to it instead?

Kind regards,
Dan McIntyre - Support Technician
Tracker Software Products (Canada) LTD

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MJN
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Re: Perimeter lines popping in and out of existence!

Post by MJN »

Oh, right -try this on for size then:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/10z_Mo- ... sp=sharing
MJN
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Re: Perimeter lines popping in and out of existence!

Post by MJN »

Hi again,

I've now run at least a dozen tests, Splitting the document with all the different settings I could tweak and I think I may have deduced the cause:

If you Split a document and the resulting new pages gets 'physically' rearranged to a new location, a copy of the orginal comments is left in the original position

In those instances where the Split is just a matter of cutting the page in half with no rearranging of pages, no copying takes place.

Hope this helps!
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TrackerSupp-Daniel
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Re: Perimeter lines popping in and out of existence!

Post by TrackerSupp-Daniel »

Hello MJN,

Thank you for the video, and the extra details from those tests!
Ill be trying to recreate this here shortly, but in case I cannot, could I ask you to send us that document to work with? Once I have a way to reproduce this reliably, Ill be creating a formal bug report for you so we can resolve this.

Kind regards,
Dan McIntyre - Support Technician
Tracker Software Products (Canada) LTD

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MJN
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Re: Perimeter lines popping in and out of existence!

Post by MJN »

Hello Daniel,

Let me know if you need that document!
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TrackerSupp-Daniel
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Re: Perimeter lines popping in and out of existence!

Post by TrackerSupp-Daniel »

Hello MJN,

Please do send the document, Im not sure if it the positioning of the content, but I am struggling to reproduce this over here. If the document contains sensitive date you can email us via support@pdf-xchange.com

Kind regards,
Dan McIntyre - Support Technician
Tracker Software Products (Canada) LTD

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TrackerSupp-Daniel
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Re: Perimeter lines popping in and out of existence!

Post by TrackerSupp-Daniel »

Hello MJN,

Thank you for emailing the document, I have managed to reproduce this here as well, and after some digging I found that it seems to be working as intended. When a comment is "split", we cannot change the comment itself to reflect the new split, instead we duplicate it and apply it to any pages which it overlaps onto. You will notice, if you organize comments by pages, that any comment which goes over the edge of one page, has a corresponding comment on the next page.
image.png
image.png
Unfortunately there is nothing we can do to change this handling at the moment, if you intend to use these in an export later on, you will need to manually curate your export while using this process, or summarize your comments before splitting the document.

Kind regards,
Dan McIntyre - Support Technician
Tracker Software Products (Canada) LTD

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MJN
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Re: Perimeter lines popping in and out of existence!

Post by MJN »

Hello Daniel,

Thank you for the clarifications.
It doesn't seem to apply only to comments cut in half by a split though, but rather duplicates of whole pages worth of comments if the pages are rearranged after the Page Split.

It would be nice to have a checkbox option in the 'Split Pages' dialog to 'Delete comment duplicates after splitting' or some such. It may not delete the 'correct' comments, but that way you can ensure there is only one copy of a particular comment, which is really important when doing quantity take offs.

Alternatively a tool to the effect of deleting all comments in the gray area/outside pages would be sweet...

As it stands, my confidence in the Editor for my line of work has taken a blow -can I be sure no other tool messes with my comments??! :shock:
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TrackerSupp-Daniel
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Re: Perimeter lines popping in and out of existence!

Post by TrackerSupp-Daniel »

Hello MJN,

I see the "off page" duplicates in your video, but was not able to reproduce it with the sample document you sent to me, this is certainly an incorrect handling, and as soon as I can reproduce it, I will pass it up the chain.

Regarding the request for split pages to have a "delete comment duplicates" function. Unfortunately this is not something that will be considered at this point in time, as there are far too many issues that would come about with such a function. As for the option to delete comments outside the page area, we will soon have a "remove comments outside crop box area" function in the Crop pages tool, which will serve this purpose:
image.png
This will be available in the upcoming 335.0 release.

Unless you have specified to do so within the tools options (or there is a bug that we haven't squashed yet), none of our tools will make any changes to existing comments, even this function does not "mess with" any of your existing comments, all existing comments were left properly as is, we simply added new duplicates of these existing ones so that visually, each page is the same. Having "quality take offs" is a bit redundant if page 2 and 3 are missing half of their comment data because a program arbitrarily decided to only leave the comments on the larger pages (1 and 4) of the document.

Rest assured knowing that we do our best to keep appearances the consistent throughout the document, even when heavy actions like splitting occur.

Kind regards,
Dan McIntyre - Support Technician
Tracker Software Products (Canada) LTD

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MJN
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Re: Perimeter lines popping in and out of existence!

Post by MJN »

Hello Daniel,

On a hunch I fired up the Crop Pages tool in the document I sent you and it shows the duplicates in the dialog:
CropPages.JPG

Then I found that using the Select Comments tool allows you to 'discover' comments in the gray area as long as you do not 'hit' the page area with your cursor:
Selectcomments1.jpg
Selectcomments2.jpg
Would it be possible to have a checkbox to the effect of 'Always select comments outside pages'?

Thank you once again -Trackers commitment to customer-service is commendable :)
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Dimitar - Tracker Supp
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Re: Perimeter lines popping in and out of existence!

Post by Dimitar - Tracker Supp »

Hello MJN,

We will forward your request to our team of developers, to consider such option for implementation.

Regards.
Puffolino
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Re: Perimeter lines popping in and out of existence!

Post by Puffolino »

There are two things I don't understand/like about cropping:

:?: what does the checkmark mean in Document/Crop Pages/Crop Page Tool?

:( why there's no chance to enter the width/height for the crop boxes?
> > This would allow to split a large construction plan into more pieces of the same (paper) size more easily.


________________
BTW this was posting 33333 in this branch, let's see when 66666 will be reached...:lol:
grafik.png
grafik.png (3.28 KiB) Viewed 3577 times
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Tracker Supp-Stefan
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Re: Perimeter lines popping in and out of existence!

Post by Tracker Supp-Stefan »

Hello Puffolino,

Where did you get the 33333 from? For me it seems like this is topic #33455, and posts are close to 139000 in the whole forum!

Anyway - to your actual questions - which checkmark do you mean? There are several in this dialogue:
Crop_pages.png
And for the Width/Height - you can enter the coordinates for the boundaries of the box - as most cases you want to e.g. crop say 5mm from each side - which is easier to calculate with 4 boundaries than with e.g. bottom left corner coordinates + Width and Height.

Regards,
Stefan
Puffolino
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Re: Perimeter lines popping in and out of existence!

Post by Puffolino »

The 33333 have been seen in the board index, still increasing :roll:

Forgot to mention the checkmark is in the menu, not the dialog:
grafik.png

Concerning the width/height thing - you're right when croping a single page to the best size, but I need to divide different floors placed on a single sheet to different pages with same dimensions (A4, for instance). It's quite tricky to do that without a calculator :wink: - Maybe a toggle button in the dialog could switch between width/height and right/bottom forms?
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Tracker Supp-Stefan
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Re: Perimeter lines popping in and out of existence!

Post by Tracker Supp-Stefan »

Hello Puffolino,

That check mark should just indicate the currently selected tool.

As for the Width/Height - I will pass it along for consideration as a think we could improve in the Crop dialogue.

Regards,
Stefan
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