Re: [FT] SSD question

On Tue, 17 October 2000, "Peter C" wrote:

> Out of curiosity... how difficult is it to make FT Visio stencils?  I
have 
> seen them on the web but haven't tried them out.  Are they scalable? 
If so, 
> sounds like a great thing.

Making a stencil is very easy. You open up a blank stencil, which looks
like an
 empty window. You draw a shape in the drawing window, and drag and drop
it int
o the stencil. You can then name the shape and edit the icon for the
shape. Tha
t's pretty much it.

The drawing window is fairly straightforward. You can do free hand and
line dra
wings. Visio comes with basic shapes that you can use for the basis of
your own
 creations. It has some good intersection and union functions so that
you can c
reate complex shapes out of basic shapes. I didn't have much difficulty
at all 
creating the FB1 and FB2 shapes, and I'm not much of an artist. The
shapes can 
be pretty sophisticated, too, with the built in support for Visual
Basic, but I
 havent' bothered with that much.

Yes, they are scalable. You can resize the object in proportion, or just
resize
 one dimension of it. You can group objects. For instance, I have shapes
for di
fferent types of salvo missile launchers and different types of
magazines. You 
can drag a specific launcher onto the drawing, drag a specific magazine,
and th
en group them into one object. 

The trick is that you need Visio. If you do have Visio, using the
stencils is v
ery easy. Creating your own objects for a stencil isn't very hard at
all.

Allan Goodall - agoodall@canada.com
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