Since these shapes use custom line patterns around their edges, they don’t fill very well, so I disabled the feature.

You can try it by doing this:

1. Show the ShapeSheet for one of the bubble revision shapes. (Window > Show ShapeSheet, or right-click if you’ve enabled Developer Mode)
2. Change the value of the cell Geometry1.NoFill from TRUE to FALSE.

You can now fill the revision shape, but portions within the bubbly part won’t fill. It might still be OK if you are doing a white fill or a partially transparent fill, though.

Wow…learn something nifty everyday. I would have never guessed something like that would change the size of the pattern. Thanks for your article and advice.

Irv

I do this by drawing the custom line pattern such that it is bigger than the alignment box. Say you draw a rectangle shape. It is exactly Width x Height big.

The Height of a custom line pattern maps to the thickness of the line. This means, in practice that you have to apply really thick lines in order to see the patterns.

I make my patterns taller than the height box so that you don’t have to enter custom line weights. So the Large pattern probably sticks out of it’s alignment box by a whole bunch (ie: -Height*2 to Height * 3) and the medium pattern a little bit less (ie: -Height to Height*2)

Hope this makes some sense…

Chris

This stuff is great. I noticed that your S, M, & L lines are of the same width and height in the custom line editor. How were you able to scale up the M & L lines without literally changing the size of the arc in the custom line editor? I suspect you had to set some setting in the line editor for the M & L lines.

And I’m not talking about how to resize lines which is mentioned in your article (that’s simple).

The effect I’m trying to get is red hatch lines on a transparent overlay so that I can highlight areas of a drawing that have to be deleted. Not an easy one eh?

Still I’ll try

Once again Thanks

If you open the ShapeSheet for a bubble revision shape, you can set Geometry1.NoFill to False. Then you will be able to fill the shape.

BUT the bubble bits around the perimeter won’t take a fill, so it might look kind of sloppy.

It might be possible to devise a custom line pattern that works with a fill pattern, but I never really thought about it. In the as-built drawings I’ve done, we just drew bubbles around parts of the drawing and didn’t do any shading.

Pete

You could probably use the Visio shape. Make sure it has no fill, then paste it into Word. If you Paste > Special, As Metafile, then you can set the Wrap Text behavior to In Front of Text, and freely move the bubble around.

As a metafile, you won’t be able to re-edit the revision bubble as you can in Visio, though. So you’d have to guess at the shape you need before pasting.

Also, Word has a Cloud Callout from it’s Insert Shapes feature. This is similar, except it has the thought-bubble-callout bit that is somewhat distracting. Again, you’ll have to give it No Fill, then set it to wrap In Front of Text so that you can see your text behind it.

To get rid of the callout portion, you can choose Edit > Shape, Edit Points, then right-click the points you don’t want and select Delete Point.