[Solved] Parts preview catalog

[Celeyron]

Hello everyone,

First of all, a big "Thank you" for these programs : you made a little boy's dream real !

I've a simple question concerning the list of official updated parts . It's hard, sometimes, to find the part we need in the preview corner of MLCad. Is there any catalog of parts preview, any PDF wich lists all the Official parts with their name, number and little preview ? It could be easier to have it on paper.

Thank you one more time for your answers !

Dom

PS : Sorry for the language errors, i'm French !

[Steffen]

I would also LOVE this feature.

(a) parts.lst ---> parts.ldr
LDView currently can export a list of parts used in a certain model,
so if we could get a simple conversion tool from the text file parts.lst to a parts.ldr
"all parts in 1 scene" file, then that part list would be easily there.
Instead of writing a conversion tool, it probably would be a better idea to give mklist.exe an option
to output parts.ldr instead of parts.lst

(b) LDView
Maybe this even could be incorporated into LDView itself, so you can directly produce
a printable parts list (HTML or PDF) from the parts.lst file.
Optimally, that part list would be grouped by !CATEGORY.

© mklist.exe
Writing this, I think it would be a good idea IMHO to extend mklist.exe.
It currently can only sort "by part number" or "by part title". I would like to see
"sorted by category", and inside each category "sorted by part title".

(d) LDView, again
Writing this, I would, independently from the issues above, like to have an option
in LDView's parts list to get it sorted by category.

I've attached to this post a *.ldr file converted from the 2012-02 parts.lst file.
I just tried to look at the resulting parts list from LDView.
Unfortunately, it refers to peeron.com images which mostly do not exist.
Better would be to point to the official images rendered on the ldraw.org server probably.

[Travis Cobbs]

I'll take your suggestions into consideration. No guarantees, but we'll see.

On an unrelated note, I noticed while loading your file that it did an unofficial part check for studel.dat. If the file only contains official parts, LDView shouldn't be doing any unofficial part checks. Is this a bug in LDView, or is this a problem with an official part?

I also see that the parts list shows the color of every part as -1. I need to update LDView to show top-level color 16 as light gray, since that's what LDView displays visually. The -1 color code is used as part of the URL for the Peeron images, and that's why none of the images display. If you replace color 16 in your file with color 7 (which I did as a test), the images show up (although it does take a long time to load the page).

[Travis Cobbs]

Does everybody else see a (major) problem with part 4346p01.dat, or is it just me? My copy uses s\4209s01.dat as its pattern. That pattern was rewritten in 2009, apparently with a different scale and orientation, but 4346p01 was last updated in 2008.

[Michael Heidemann]

I see the same here, but maybe my library is outdated. Will have a look into this the next days.

[Steffen]

the problem has already been taken care of, the file is on the PT already for fixing the issue