hi, I just started using turbocad to draw out my lighting design. The problem is that when i drag the lamps into the layout they end up being huge on the screen.... whats wrong, or what should I do differently?
TurboCAD? Are they still around? I used to have a copy somewhere around here... a DOS version, back in the eighties.
Anyhow, you might want to check the scaling - if the lights were built at a different scale than the lighting plot you're doing, that might be a problem. I had a similar thing trying to bring a PCBlayout into the mechanical CAD package I was using to design the cabinet... the board dimensions were in mils (thousandths of an inch) while I was designing the cabinet in inches - when I brought the board in, it came in unconverted, i.e. 1000 times as big as it was supposed to be. Perhaps your lights were designed in inches, but your plot is in feet. Just a thought.
I used a cad package in high school and I think DMXtools is on the money. It sounds like a scaling issue. Also make sure that when you print, you are printing in correct scale.
To fix my scaling problem I had to go back to the original board drawing and change the units to inches, then save it. Then I could load the cabinet drawing (in inches) and import the board and it was scaled properly.