Software question: Visio

[Dave]

For Visio users...

Does anyone know whether star trek stencils exist for Visio? This would be a great program for making deckplans. I've looked around the net and haven't found anything. So far I've only come across network/office floorplans, etc.

[T'lara]

Originally posted by Dave
For Visio users...

Does anyone know whether star trek stencils exist for Visio? This would be a great program for making deckplans. I've looked around the net and haven't found anything. So far I've only come across network/office floorplans, etc.

Star Trek Stencils? Never heard of this program. Sounds like a must have for me. Give me more information please.

[Balok]

VISIO is a drawing program, originally developed by Shapeware, later sold to Microsoft (the current owners). It's oriented towards vector art, as opposed to a program like Paintshop Pro, which is more raster oriented. (That's not to say that either program lacks the other capability, it's just my opinion of what's easy to do.)

A cool feature of Visio is the ability to design what are called "Masters". These are shapes that, once developed, can be stored in "stencils", stretched, rotated, and suchlike. Because they're "smart", they can connect to each other, scale properly, and so forth.

Visio's not very good at freehand drawing, at least as of version 5.0 (the version I have). Instead, drawings are constructed from shape libraries (either ones you create, or ones they provide). I've also found it can be a challenge to get curves to behave just the way you want them to.

I'm not aware of any Trek stencils or templates, specifically, but Dave is right -- with these, deckplans would be quite easy to draw.

[Ezri's Toy]

The "starship engineer" in our Trek club is an actual aircraft engineer. He's using a CATIA loaded mainframe computer and an architechtural drawing plotter to draw his deck plans of our fictional starship.