Architosh Staff ([email protected])

15 Sep 2002

 

Special Feature: BOA In-Depth - Part 2

Continued from page 3.

Laying Out Drawings in a Layout File

In BOA you create actual drawings which you print in a separate file called a Layout Sheet. To create a layout sheet you go to File > New > Layout Sheet. A blank sheet appears. To change the size of your paper print area, go to File > Page Setup. Out pops the Print Setup palette on the Utilities window.

At this point we set up the Layout Sheet by setting a page scale for the drawing elements. Then we open up the Composition palette. Expand the palette by double-clicking the far left tool button. Three drop down menus appear. You must select a BOA file from the Project File menu to begin placing drawings in the layout file. (see image 011)

Selecting New allows you to navigate to a BOA project file. Once a file is selected the drawings that are currently saved in that BOA project file will appear in the Drawings drop down menu. You select one and then click on the far left tool button, the Cropping Frame tool, and drag a rectangle on the layout sheet to place your drawing within. If the drawing is larger than your first frame you can use the second tool from the left, the Reframe tool, to resize it. You can purposely make a frame smaller than a drawing in order to simply print just a section of it. In that instance the frame acts like a masks, masking out everything that runs under its invisible borders. For those Quark XPress users out there, this process will fill very familiar and natural.

Image 011

Layout Sheets

Once your drawings are located on the layout page you can continue to embellish them with notation, for example. Why one would do that notation on the layout page rather than in the model would depend on various circumstances. In any case, we explored the notation text tool and placed a series of callouts on the enlarged executive office plan. (See image 012 below)

Image 012

Working with text is one area BOA needs more refinement. Rather than just picking a font size from a menu and creating a text block in which to start typing, in BOA you first define your text style. From a drop down menu you select New and then name and define the text style. That part is not particularly unusual or painful; what is painful is the sizing of text because BOA makes you define it in inches. But does anybody know exactly how tall in fractions of an inch, 28 point size is in Helvetica? BOA regulars will likely tell you that one gets used to and knowledgeable of point sizes and their inch equivalents, but the reality is that having regular point sizes to choose from is the norm in most software applications. We hope in a future BOA version this limitation is eliminated and replaced with real font point size menus.

Having gotten past this -- defining text styles -- it is really straight forward to place additional notation on the drawing, whether it be callouts or drawing titles. Likewise, the notation text tool makes easy work of placing notes with leader lines, with a variety of arrow choices. Looking at our work, we have a completed layout sheet (not shown) in which various BOA drawings were embedded (or placed with) in frames of our sizing.

Closing Comments

This brings us to the end of our indepth BOA series. Hopefully, if you have read this far, you have taken it upon yourself to visit the BOA site and learn more. BOA is an excellent visualization CAD package targeting the architectural audience. For some users, especially those already equipped with 3D modeling experience, BOA will be a quick study, while others more familiar with 2D drafting-oriented CAD packages (Autocad included), the program will be harder to learn but not impossible.

It should be said that BOA is programmed very well. It hardly ever crashed. And even on an aging Power Mac G4 350, the program was extremely snappy and agile. For a more well rounded review of BOA, read our major review here.

We would love to hear from readers about this two part "indepth" series, to learn whether this type of format is satisfactory or if it is too protracted. We have also thought about doing a type of visual indepth series where we spend less time walking folks through particular steps and more time just visually exploring the application's many facets. What we ultimately wish to get is feedback that justifies us spending this amount of time (which is a huge amount!) on a review of this nature. So please give us some constructive feedback.

If you are a product vendor and would love to see your product reviewed to this depth, please email us and let us know.

Related Reviews

Review: BOA 2.4.1 for Mac OS 9

Special Feature: BOA In-depth - Part 1

Related Articles on BOA

BOA: Next-generation CAD for Macintosh - Exclusive Interview with Nader Family, CEO

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