Topic Title

First off, I am using a Mac with Parallels to run DataCAD. Yes there are quirks, but I am slowly working through them. The latest issue I am experiencing is when I import my specifications (text) into the drawing. I am using Word 2011 for Mac. When I was running Word on a PC, I would select the entire document > copy > go into DataCAD > Paste Special > Text - and it would import it with everything aligning to the left. All indentations were lost, but it was a simple thing to correct and something I just accepted.

Now when I import, I am having issues with spacing, and a lot of "symbols" are not converting. Things like dashes, quotation marks, etc. are becoming ?'s. See screenshot

I have tried saving the Word document as ".doc", ".rtf", ".txt". I have also tried uploading the document to Apple's Pages app, and importing. Same situation. Really not sure what to do, other than install a copy of Office within Parallels and see if that works. But that seems redundant to have 2 copies of Word.

Has anyone else run into this before, or is there an easier way to import a word document of text? While I don't want to re-write all my specs, if there is a format that would make it work like before, I will painstakingly go through it all.

The best interface between any word processing program and a Paratext dialog box is NotePad. You can Copy/Paste from your word processor of choice on the Mac side, into NotePad in Windows.

And tabs are not supported, by the way, no matter what OS you are running. Windows in a virtual machine on a Mac has almost no affect on how DataCAD functions.

What version of Windows are you using? How much RAM in the Mac, and how much of it is configured for Windows to use?

Neil,

It must be the tabs that is causing it. The screenshot was me trying a new format that cleaned things up a little bit in the text, and I was using tabs to indent. Whereas the previous format I don't think is tab'd.

MacBook Pro Specs
- 2.5 Ghz intel Core i7
- 16GB RAM
- 2GB dedicated video

I think I dedicated 12GB of RAM for Windows 8.1 Pro - thinking when windows is open, I am using it for CAD.

So to follow up on this, I think I may have figured out a work-around. Everyone does their text differently, and if someone has another suggestion, I am all for it. Also, I do not use Paratext or Mtext - maybe I am missing out on something. Or maybe I am using one of those text formats, but don't realize it.

In Word 2011 for Mac, I can create an indented/tab'd document per the way Word automatically indents an outline format. I will then save the document as a ".docx" format (more just to make sure I have a back-up). I then do a save-as with the format being "Plain Text (.txt)". Click save and an additional window pops up. I make sure the text encoding is set to "MS-DOS". And I will check "Allow character substitution". (Disclaimer - I have not done a whole review of the spec document, but the problem areas that I would see in the beginning seem to have disappeared.)

Now when I insert the text, I still need to move each line over a set distance to give me the outline look. Yes it is a pain in the @ss, but thats how I have been doing it for the last 10 years or so. If there is another way to get the look I am going after, please save me some mind-less work, and share.

I am hoping that when I do a whole set of specs this will eliminate my issues, as I feel as though I am on the right track. Hopefully this will help others if they run into this problem

If each line of text is an entity, then you are using the old style text. If the group of lines of text are an entity, then you are (probably) using ParaText. ParaText is the way to go for most thing in DataCAD. I have just bee using 3 or 5 spaces to for a "tab" and this compromise makes it much easier to deal with lots of text, that needs to be edited from time to time.

To my shame, I've been suing a work-around for Text and Spreadsheet Tables using Sketchup-Layout for coversheets, specification and schedules.

My specifications are typically OpenOffice Writer or Notepad documents. Schedules are in OpenOffice Spreadsheet either as stand-alone spreadsheets, or inserted back into the text document.

Method-1; I just use Layout with the same titleblock as my Datacad construction drawings for text and schedules. Since my final construction documents are "merged" individual sheet-page .pdf-files it really doesn't matter which program generates the 11x17".pdf-page, that I then combine into a unitary file using PDFill PDFTools. I find Layout is much better suited for graphical layouts since it's pure "paper-space".

Method-2: Also using PDFill PDFTools, I take individual .pdf pages generated in OpenOffice Writer or OpenOffice Spreadsheets and convert them into .jpegs that I then insert into Layout as the whole page-image underneath the Layout titleblock. Then it's "printed" as a .pdf for combination into a unitary file as above. The drawback is two-fold; 1. that you have to print each page separately for a multipage document. And 2. you have to convert each page into .jpegs individually and insert. Revisions to the document mean repeating the process.


Even after 20+ years using Datacad, I still can't get the hang of using Ptext and Mtext.
I should be punished...