AC24 Offset edge behavior has changed

[Richard Morrison]

It seems that the offset edge palette has changed slightly from AC23 to AC24. In AC23, you could connect a polyline to regular lines, group them, and then you could use the offset edge palette selection to move one of these lines and they would all stay "connected". Now, in AC24, when you group polylines and lines together, and then try to move an edge, the offset edge pet palette option does not even show up until you Unify the lines.

Is this behavior intentional, or is it a bug? Are we supposed to be doing this differently now?

[Laszlo Nagy]

Richard,
Could you post a screenshot of a concrete example? I tried this in both AC23 and AC24 and it works for me the same way in the two versions.

[Richard Morrison]

Thanks for checking this Laszlo. I tried again today to recreate the issue, and I couldn't. However, I did clarify one weird issue that may have been part of what happened yesterday. If you draw a polyline similar to the attached, the offset edge pet palette icon is available with the mercedes cursor. However, if you explode the polyline, it isn't. BUT, if you draw a similar shape with individual lines (all selected), you can offset the edge similar to the unexploded polyline. I'm not sure why the exploded polylines don't behave like individual lines.

[Dontknow]

I haven't got AC24 yet.
The educational version hasn't been released yet.

Did you try to use the 'Suspend Groups'?
Then select all lines or the polylines and use 'Offset edge' or 'Offset all edges'.

[Laszlo Nagy]

There is something going on here.
Richard, I could reproduce the thing you wrote in your last post. The "Offset" and "Offset all Edges" commands are not there in that scenario.

There is another curious thing, shown below. I connected a Polyline to a Line. If I click an edge of the Polyline (left side) then I can only offset the Polyline. When I click the edge of the Line (right side), with the Polyline and Lines are offset. However, the offset vector is not perpendicular to the Line I clicked, it is perpendicular to the middle segment of the Polyline.:

So I think something is wrong here, therefore I will report this to GRAPHISOFT.

[Richard Morrison]

I noticed that, too, and it caught me by surprise. Running the Unify command made it work as before, so the workaround was easy enough that I didn't give it too much thought. But I don't think we should have to do this.

[Minh Nguyen]

Hi all,

Thank you for the report and testing so far!

I believe this is partly intentional, partly buggy. Let me try to summarize what we've got so far:

1. Grouping polyline with line, and offset edge does not work AC24: As Richard mentioned, this issue cannot be produced anymore. I myself could not recreate this issue either on AC23 or AC24. Hopefully it was just a one-time thing!

2. Exploded polyline behaves different from grouped single lines: I think this is a bug, let me ask the development team about this.

3. Group of lines and polylines cannot have offset edge together unless clicking on the single lines: I'm not quite sure about this. Not sure if this can be useful in any situation. Let me ask the developers about this as well. Also, as Dontknow pointed out, Suspend Groups will allow group of lines to have Offset Edge.

4. Offset vector is not perpendicular with the clicked line: tapping Shift once will allow us to choose the direction of the offset vector. I guess it's not a big issue, but again, I'll ask the developers to make sure!

Once I have their answer, I will post it here. Thank you very much for noticing this!
Have a great day!

Best regards,
Minh

[Minh Nguyen]

Hi all,

I have received an explanation from the developer about Offset edge behavior:

2. Notice, when we explode a polyline it falls into individual Polyline elements and not Line elements. This in itself is not a bug but the missing Offset for these chained single-segment polylines can be considered as a special case of issue #3. As a workaround, we can also turn polylines into lines by using the Linework consolidation command.

3. When offsetting is started from the polyline, it should behave the same way as if we clicked on a line in the chain. (i.e. offsetting all edges). This is a bug.

4. This is almost certainly a consequence of issue #3 and a bug for sure. Directions should be perpendicular. For now, directions correspond to one of the earlier segment in the polyline depending on which of the lines we had clicked on.

I have entered this defect into our database. Please let me know if you have any further questions!

Have a great day!

Best regards,
Minh