Off an on over the last few days I’ve been working on a new set of instructions. I’ve long wanted to capture instructions for my 6 Car Airport Shuttle and I finally did so last weekend. The actual capture work in ML-CAD didn’t take long, a few hours at most. As I’ve noted before, generating a useful set of instructions is not a trivial task and I’ve been toying with it periodically since Sunday.
Every time I use Kevin Clague’s LPub application I am amazed. Having done numerous instructions by hand a number of years ago, I have tremendous respect for what his program is capable of. I had stopped doing instructions because they were tremendously time consuming – LPub makes doing instructions a rather enjoyable process.
At this point I have a decent draft completed. I say draft because, while complete, there are few things I’m still not happy with and a couple things wrong which I am struggling to fix. The instructions are 28 pages long and a large download (about 18MB).
The two things I am chasing right now are:
- There are several places where the step numbers aren’t present and I can’t figure out why.
- I am also unsure how to deal with the final assembly. It is long – almost 200 studs but only 4 studs wide and about 5 bricks tall. I can’t seem to get a final assembly image to scale without affecting all of the other images being scaled as well so for now, I have left it out.
- The cover is rendered as a separate model and then inserted into the PDF file using Acrobat to replace the empty cover page.
[download#20#image]
