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Drawings with Lots of Bitmaps

PostPosted: Sun Oct 13, 2013 6:12 am
by wvar
I frequently work with drawings that have many bitmaps inserted. I find that having lots of bitmaps in a drawing really slows down Datacad when panning and zooming. I know that I can turn off the display of bitmaps. However, this does not help me as I need to work with the bitmaps displayed.

Is there a way of speeding up Datacad when many bitmaps are inserted. Otherwise, is it possible to reduce the on screen quality of the displayed bitmaps.

In my current project I have 71 (yes) photos and each photo is between 100 Kb - 1 Mb

I am running W7 Pro Home with 4 Mb RAM. For this project I had to resort to using Bricscad. The file zooms and pans quite nippily.

Please do not take this as a criticism, just a suggestion.

Re: Drawings with Lots of Bitmaps

PostPosted: Sun Oct 13, 2013 6:52 am
by Mark F. Madura
You could try experimenting with these DCADWIN.INI settings.

[Bitmaps]
MinSize=0.001
MaxSize=100
; Specify the minimum and maximum size in megabytes of bitmaps to store in memory.
; Increase the minimum size and decrease the maximum size if the amount of RAM you have
; available is limited (i.e. 256MB or less) and if your drawings contain either a lot of
; and/or large bitmaps.

[Display]
Enhanced Bitmap=FALSE
; If FALSE, DataCAD will take less time to resample bitmaps before they are displayed
; (i.e., lower quality). If TRUE, DataCAD will take more time to resample bitmaps before
; they are displayed (i.e., higher quality).

Re: Drawings with Lots of Bitmaps

PostPosted: Sun Oct 13, 2013 8:21 am
by wvar
Thanks for your help Mark. However I do not seem to notice any difference. I tried Max settings from 25 to 800 and min settings from 0.001 to 10.

Placing bitmaps on different layers helped a little but not really practical as I need to have them all displayed at times?

Re: Drawings with Lots of Bitmaps

PostPosted: Sun Oct 13, 2013 8:27 am
by wvar
FWIW Mark. If I pan by holding the left & right mouse button panning is quick. Can something similar be done with zooming?

Re: Drawings with Lots of Bitmaps

PostPosted: Fri Oct 18, 2013 10:15 am
by wwwylie
wvar wrote:Can something similar be done with zooming?

You can use the scroll wheel on your mouse to zoom. You may need to hold down Ctrl to do this, but that is changeable in Tools>Program Preference>Misc.

Re: Drawings with Lots of Bitmaps

PostPosted: Fri Oct 18, 2013 3:47 pm
by wvar
Wade. zooming is slow while using the mouse. If only there was a way for datacad to grey out bitmaps while zooming with the mouse. Nowcthat would be a big step forward.