I also had this device with a thin metal tube that was used to spill a mixture of soot, water and gum arabic on the pressed pulp.

Anssi

Dave,

A vector EPS can be converted into DWG in Illustrator, and that can be inserted into SU. Using the right (free) plugins, the same feat ought to be possible in the free Ghostscript app too-I haven't tried it for a long time.

Anssi

This has been happening for as long as I have been using SU. For some reason the EPS/PDF export has IMO less missing lines. This might be paradoxically due to it being more inaccurate...

On the other hand, the hidden-line algorithms of other apps do not seem to be too accurate either. I have seen the same happen when doing hidden-line plots from AutoCad too.

Anssi

With SU, the division of work goes so that the CPU takes care of the vector stuff, and the video card of textures, shadows and the like. So in fact SU is very CPU-intensive. With other apps, it might be different. Video card performance generally only affects what you see on screen and how responsive your apps feel. Rendering to a file is typically done by the CPU only, the video is used to draw the user interface and preview windows etc. on the screen.

As SU, like most modeling and CAD applications, is still unable to profit from multiple CPU-s, buying a new computer with a dual-core or multicore CPU is not a great way of enhancing SU performance. Many rendering applications, however, can split their tasks between multiple processor cores.

Anssi

Sent

Anssi

I would say that even less than a hundred dollars should buy you a GeForce video card that will make a big difference. Almost anything will be better than onboard graphics. The computer I am using now is very similar, a luggable that when I first received it was missing the GeForce FX Go5700 video card, and I had to do with the onboard graphics for a while. At work I have a faster (3.3 GHz) computer with a Quadro card, but it does not feel noticeably faster with SU.

My display only has 64 Mb of memory and I have not noticed any difficulties with that, but to be modern, and if you like to have two displays, go for 256 Mb or more.

Anssi

Looks good in general. Maybe the layout has a bit too much empty white space. The old @Last forum was so delightfully compressed.

Anssi

What number of segments are you using? As the SU circle is always in the end a polygon, only a circle with a segment count divisible by 4 would fit exactly inside a square, with an endpoint touching each side.

Anssi