Using plant catalogs
As described in Concept: Plant style and plant data integration, the botanical data incorporated into plant styles can either be associated with plant catalogs or with the plant database. Using plant catalogs is recommended; the process is simple, and online catalogs are available from commonly-available plant manufacturers.
Plant catalogs are tab-delimited text files, which can be easily edited outside of Vectorworks if needed.
Accessing the plant catalogs
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Command |
Workspace: Path |
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Open Plant Data |
Design Suite: AEC > Plants Landmark: Landmark Context menu |
Plant catalogs are accessed when editing a plant style or from the Open Plant Data command.
To access the plant catalogs:
Follow the steps described in Selecting the plant data source, and choose Plant Catalog as the source of data.
If you have plant database selected as the data source, the Open Plant Data command opens the selected plant database instead; see Accessing the plant database.
Select the command.
Alternatively, create or edit a plant style as described in Creating plant styles. From the Species and Data pane of the Plant Style dialog box, click Plant Catalog.
The Select Plant Data dialog box opens.
Click to show/hide the parameters.Click to show/hide the parameters.
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Parameter |
Description |
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Plant Catalog |
Select the plant catalog that contains the desired plant information; the list includes plant catalogs from the default content, plant catalogs that you have created, and plant catalogs you have created from the plant database and saved in the database location. A progress bar indicates the status of the plant catalog import when it is used for the first time. |
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New Plant Catalog |
Clears the current plant catalog selection, creating a new blank catalog; provide a name in the New Plant Catalog dialog box. The new catalog is added to the list of plant catalogs. |
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Explore |
Opens Explorer (Windows) or Finder (Mac) to the folder containing the plant catalogs |
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Plants |
Lists the plants contained in the selected plant catalog |
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Use filter |
Displays the list of plants using the specified filter |
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Opens the Plant Filter dialog box. Specify how to filter the list of plants to see only the ones of interest. Select the available filter parameters for each row of choices, and then select the comparison operator and the value. The operators support ranges, using the |_| delimiter; if a plant data value is defined as a range, and a value entered with the = operator is within the range, the plant is found. Using < with a value finds the lower range value, and > finds the upper range value. Select existing to choose from a list that is derived from the plants in the catalog, or select custom to enter a value. The “like” operator, for text, can use the * symbol to represent any set of characters, and the ? to represent any single character. Specify additional options, adding a new row of filter choices by clicking More Choices. To remove the most recently added row, click Fewer Choices. |
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Display plants by |
Toggles plant display by botanical name or common name |
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Name List |
Lists the plants included in the currently selected plant catalog. Select a plant to view its botanical information on the right, and to use that data in the plant style (if you clicked Plant Catalog to open the dialog box). |
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Plant Data |
Displays the botanical information for the plant selected in the name list. The number of available plant data fields varies, depending on global region. |
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Edit |
Opens the Edit Plant Data Field dialog box, to edit the value of the currently selected data row; several rows can be selected and edited at one time |
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Plant Images |
Displays images that have been selected or downloaded for the current plant (see Setting plant data images) |
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Opens the Edit Image dialog box. An image for the plant can be imported from an external file by clicking Browse and selecting the image; to delete an existing image, select Remove image. |
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Add |
Opens the Add Plant dialog box, for Adding plants to the plant catalog |
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Delete |
Deletes the currently selected plant from the plant catalog |
If you clicked Plant Catalog to obtain botanical information for a plant style, select a single plant and click OK.
The data from the plant catalog updates the plant style.
