scale question in building plan (Vis 2003)

[Eddie]

I will be drawing many building plans for use in fire trucks as pre-fire
plans.

Is it possible for most shapes to be the scale of the drawing (walls,
parking spaces, trucks, doors etc.) of say 1in to 20 ft, but some shapes be
to no scale (compass rose, fire hydrants, electrical and gas shutoff for
example) ?

Currently if one drawing is 1:20 everything is fine, but on a much larger
drawing (like a school) might need to be 1:60, and my symbols that represent
something now are way to small.

Is there anyway to have different layers to a different scale? or force a
shape to not scale?

Thank you,

Eddie Jones

 

[Mark Nelson [MS]]

Yes, you can make shapes that do not scale. This is generally called
anti-scaling because you are taking the current size of the shape and
dividing by the current scale to get back to a consistent size.

Visio 2003 introduced a new Shapesheet cell called DropOnPageScale. Visio
puts page scale into this cell when your shape is dropped onto a page. If
you set up your shape to depend on this value, you can prevent scaling from
impacting the shape. For example, to maintain a constant width you would
enter this in the Width cell:

=0.5 in/DropOnPageScale

--
Mark Nelson
Office Graphics - Visio
Microsoft Corporation

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

 

[Eddie]

Thanks for the help, Mark

It sounds like you have the idea I'm looking for, but I tried changing the
width cell in the shapesheet as you described, but the shape still seemed to
change size with everything else when I rescaled the drawing. do I need to
make a change to the DropOnPageScale cell too?

Is there a scale variable that I can put in that width cell to make the
change I'm looking for, something like:

Width Cell= 0.5in/scale

so that when the scale changes, so does the size of the shape

Thanks again,

Eddie


Again, In a nutshell, I want to make a change to some of the shapes so that
regardless of the scale the drawing is set at ( from the Page Setup menu,
Drawing Scale tab) those certain shapes all look the same size on screen or
print, regardless if the scale is 1in is 10ft or 30ft.

 

[Mark Nelson [MS]]

Sorry. You put the formula in the master shape before it is dropped on the
scaled page.

--
Mark Nelson
Office Graphics - Visio
Microsoft Corporation

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

 

[Eddie]

Mark Nelson,

Took me a long time, but I found what I needed.

Height = 0.5 in * ThePage!Drawingscale/ThePage!Pagescale
Width = 0.5 in * ThePage!Drawingscale/ThePage!Pagescale

As long as the cells arn't guarded, they seem to drop on the page the
correct size and scale porperly when the page scale is changed.

Thanks again for you help,

Eddie