On Land

The new large format printer has wider margins than the old one, leaving slightly less usable layout area.

The available layout area is the paper size minus the margins. Our current masters, based on narrower margins, don't fit in the new, slightly smaller layout area. When you go to print, you will see the Print dialog trying to put the layout onto four sheets, and offering to shrink the layout to make it fit. Neither is a good idea.

This is easy to fix.

First, get the margins from the printer. For each master in use, highlight it in the layout tree and click Settings. At the Size control, select "Import Settings From Printer".

You will then get a Page Setup dialog box. Select the 192.168.1.214 item and then the appropriate paper size. (These are: C - 18x24in. D - 24x36in. E - 30x42in.)

OK that dialog box. If you look fast you can see the margin values change from less than a hundredth of an inch to more than a tenth:

Second, for each detail master you have to change the grid. In the master's settings again, click Grid Setup. Change the four values under "Distance From Margin" to be 1/8" less:

This change makes no difference in the printed output, since the new margin still lies outside the graphical frame of the sheet.

Are you interested in unsolicited email management advice?

This isn't a lightly covered topic by any means, but I find a lot of organizational guidance to be perfectionist bordering on, no offense, compulsive. I don't care if my inbox is completely empty, or if I have too many folders or too few. I only care that:

• No important messages get missed

• No less-important messages get to interrupt me. I'm busy.

Throughout this discussion, I am using a narrow definition of 'important', which is roughly: Having some legitimate claim on my near-term attention. And don't get me wrong, where would we be without so-called less-important stuff?

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Marco "Tumblr, Instapaper" Arment tells Dan Benjamin:

One of the reasons many of us...love Apple products is because they think about a lot of the details that a lot of other manufacturers don't, in both hardware and software. And it's those little details that a lot of people think don't matter, or aren't worth the time and money to get right, that add up to a really great experience and goodwill from your users. So that's always been a high priority for me, to try and get all the details right.... Even if somebody has never run into something, I'm still happy it's there, because for the few people who do run into it, it makes them a little bit happier. If you look at a lot of the features of luxury cars, for instance, they're features that most people won't ever use. And they accidentally discover it sometime, they're just a little bit delighted by that.... And if we can do that same thing in software by providing these little delights to users, or by smoothing over a few rough edges that they should never have to see, that adds up to a significantly better product than one made by a firm that doesn't really care about those details.

I find less irritating tools to be less irritating.

Here is a most ancient and despised bug in Archicad's wall cleanup behavior.

In most cases, if two surface edges meet whose materials are the same, the line between the surfaces is eliminated.

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Crown Tool JM10

We have several objects offer the user a group of roof slope selection parameters. You can select an n/12 slope from the list, or you can enter a custom slope angle. When you select a slope, the angle changes. When you put in an angle, the slope parameter will show n/12 if there is a match, and 'Custom' if not.

I use GLOB_MODPAR_NAME statements to keep such parameters in sync. In the code there are a bunch of IF/THEN statements associating the angles and the named slopes.

Since this lookup is used by several objects, I keep it in a macro and use RETURNED_PARAMETERS to get the data back to the calling object.

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Intersection priorities help the user control interactions between certain elements. Wall and beam elements have their own intersection priority; I'm calling that the element priority. Composite skins (and components of custom profiles) have their own intersection priorities. Those are skin priorities. Neither of these should be confused with the intersection group number property of layers, though that bears on intersections too!

Element priorities effect plan and 3D geometry. Skin priorities effect only plan. Managing skin priorities is the key to proper automatic joint cleanup between composite walls in plan. Here's a look at the essentials of skin priorities and our standard composite setup.

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If you encounter a failed Archicad autosave (Crash followed by no recovery dialog at relaunch), and you are running Time Machine in OS X, restore the Autosave folder from Time Machine instead of messing with cron job workarounds.

Make sure Archicad is not running.

Activate Time Machine on the Dock.

Navigate to [Home]/Library/Application Support/Graphisoft/. You should see a folder called Archicad Autosave Folder. If you don't, go 'back in time' by clicking the next window. If you see more than one Autosave folder, sort the window by Date Modified to determine the right one.

Highlight that folder and click the Restore button. (You shouldn't get a 'replace this folder' warning, because if the Archicad Autosave Folder was present, Archicad would have seen it and given you the recovery dialog. If you do get it, make sure Archicad is not running.)

Once the folder copies over, relaunch Archicad. It should find the Autosave data and present you with the recovery dialog. Depending on when Time Machine ran last, you may have lost more work than you would with a normal autosave.

It may happen that you would like to manually hack Archicad's recent files list. Recent projects are shown in the Start Archicad dialog box when AC launches. Recent projects and library parts are shown at File -> Recent Documents. One good reason to prune this list is that you can get apparent-duplicate items if you open a files from different locations, such as a server v. a local folder. Another reason is if you change servers and you need to make sure the recent items have the right address.

These are OS X instructions. We use the free utility Pref Setter to edit plist files. On Windows, use whatever Windows users use.

The AC preference files are at [home]/Library/Preferences/. There are a number of AC prefs; the one we want is com.graphisoft.AC .plist. You can right-click on the file and choose Open With... Pref Setter, or open the file from Pref Setter's File Menu.

The Pref Setter window will present all the 'Keys' in the plist file. Scroll to Recent Files.

Projects are listed first: Plan File_1., Plan File_2.,... You can delete any of these items. You can also modify the path in the Value field, to point to a different server, for example. Following the projects themselves, there is a Plan FileType_ item for each project. If you are deleting project items, you can delete these items as well, or not. It doesn't matter. Following that is a Plan Number item. This value is set automatically; you can ignore it.

After all the project list information, there is a similar arrangement for recent library parts that have been created or opened for editing. In this context the word 'Symbol' means library part: Symbol File_1., Symbol File_2.,... You can delete or hack these exactly like the project items.

(There are also integer keys for the number of RecentPlans (projects) and RecentObjects (library parts) you would like to see in the list. These are set to 12 by default, perhaps you would like more or fewer.)

We had to do some of this recently when we moved our projects, libraries, modules, etc. to a new server with a different address. When AC launches, it will try to make sure the recent files are accessible. This may lead to a prompt to log in to the missing server. Or, if the password for the server is stored in the user's keychain, the old server volumes can mount without you noticing it. Next comes confusion about where you are actually working, which is never good. Tip: Delete the password to the old server in Keychain Access. That way, you will be notified when AC wants to go looking where it shouldn't and you need to hack your prefs.

(To be honest, even after carefully working through this, I have seen AC mysteriously seek out the old volumes. There's some glitchy behavior going on, but it seems to settle down over time. We do what we can.)

Roundup of issues with daily shutdown, data backup, and power failures.

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