Like most writers I am a voracious reader.  I can read a couple hundred pages in less than an hour.  I chalk this up to my days as an honors humanities student in college where we were assigned to read a minimum of 500 pages each night.  (Luckily for me, I had already read most of the assignments in high school.)

 

Because I live in a rural area, regular trips to the library is not an option, so I have been buying books to read.  This summer I looked around my house and realized I had accumulated more than 200 paperbooks which I really didn't want, need, and probably couldn't sell.

 

So, I signed up for BookSwim.  For a monthly fee, they mail you books off a list you create on-line.  You mail them back postage paid.  Since I already have been using Netflix for several years, following the same model for books was not that big a leap for me. 

 

I figure joining BookSwim will save me a hundred dollars a month in books I would have bought, not to mention keeping the clutter in my house down (which is worth considerably more).   The mailing is not as fast as Netflix, so there is more of a delay, but I can deal with that.

 

Check it out... 

Every once in a while, I will hear from a user complaining that their text doesn't look as crisp and clean as it should on their plots...or worse, the text looks like garbage.

 

This is actually a pretty easy fix.

When you go to Plot, select the Plotter properties button.

Then locate the Graphics category and set True Type to print as graphics.

 

Problem solved!

I am pretty comfortable programming in LISP, but Inventor and SW don't support LISP...this means I had to move over to Visual Basic.  I finally started getting comfortable in Visual Basic and now (sob) I am forced to move over to VB.net.  This is because the more recent releases of SolidWorks and Inventor don't support Visual Basic.

 

Isn't it enough of a hassle to deal with the constant release of new software?  Now, the tools I use to customize the software are also going obsolete.  And if you think it is a pain learning new releases of software, the pain of learning a new programming tool is easily ten times that.

 

Of course, I didn't learn that SolidWorks doesn't support Visual Basic only VB.net until AFTER I had written the program.  Just one more bullet to bite.

 

This was an easy lisp to write...took less than a minute.  As always, it is open and fully commented so you can see how it works, and make changes for your own use.