The more I use mechanica, the more frustrated I become with the program, especially the post processor. Creating presentable documents is often difficult and sometimes impossible.
Starting with the title of this document, "Paper is white", when I print the results of my analysis I do so on white paper. Unfortunately, the colour schemes for Mechanica are designed for a dark backgound. While there is an option for a white backgorund, the fact that you cannot change the color of several displayed elements, such as loads and constraints, raction force values, etc. means that they are not visible when printed. Even when printed with the dark backgound, these elements are hard to read due to their faint font. This problem is especilly vexing when working with beam models. Essentially I am unable to create readable documents of my results. The line representing the beam in teh mdel is so thin the oclors are nearly invisible. Often with beam models, i am looking for the reaction loads to use in other analyses. However, the test is white and invisible on a white background and when printed on a dark background the font of this data is thin it is unreadable. Further, when creating graphs, there is no scheme for changing the backgroung color. Changing the background color involves having to individually chnaging the color of every component, at a great expense of time. This time expense is multiplied due to the fact the every generation of the graph, the process of changing the colors has to be repeated.
The second issue, is the order and number of the windows in the display. Unlike, say Algor, I can only display 4 windows in a single output file. Further, the order of the windows cannot be altered. Say there are three windows, two will be small, and on will be be big. It is not possible to choose which are the small windows and which is the large window.
These are but a few of the issues I have with Mechnica. What makes these issues most frustrating is that I have used other programs such as Algor and Cosmos. It must be remembered that best results are useless if the cannot be expressed clearly and easily.
J Penner
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