Hi Eric
As far as I can tell, the new perpendicular system works really well on a simple drawing. But on a complicated drawing with lots of lines and objects in close proximity it seems to get confused.
Turning off P, to draw a non-perpendicular line from E, C or I works fine.
But it's drawing a perpendicular that seems to be the problem. Sometimes, even with E, I & C turned off, and only P active, it can't find a P at all, until I go to a different part of the drawing – or draw a new line and find a P on that.
And again even with E, I & C turned off, sometimes if it finds a P, it won't 'slide' along the line it is perpendicular to like it used to.
And sometimes it draws a perpendicular but not exactly from the line you are wanting to draw from. It's close but not exactly on it.
So yes, I think it would be better to restore the P snap to its old form – which works really well even on complicated drawings with lots of lines and objects close.
Are you sure it wouldn't be easier for drawing P from a specific point, just to have three more Snaps: P from E, P from C, and P from I. There are some spare shortcut letters left – perhaps F for "PE", K for "PC" and J for "PI". Or something like that. Or is that not possible/too cumbersome? Or is that in fact similar to what you are suggesting, just in two steps – I didn't quite understand what you meant?
I remember in the old ClarisCad you held the shift key down and selected the two snap icons you wanted (say Perpendicular AND Centre). With the shortcuts you could only do a single snap (Perpendicular OR Centre). But in Claris, the snaps couldn't be left turned on in the same way as in RealCADD. You could keep one on by double-clicking its icon, but that only lasted if you also double-clicked the icon for what you were drawing (say Line), so it wasn't anywhere as convenient as RealCADD.
I'm really sorry my suggestion has been so troublesome. I do think that one should consider PE, PC and PI as secondary snap functions, so it's not such a bad thing if they have to be chosen only when required, rather than active all the time.
Edit 3rd Feb I made a small movie of the problem at
http://whisstock.com/images/p_problem.mov What I was aiming to do was to draw a perpendicular from the inner line (with just P selected) to the end of the red line, selecting E as i drew it – but the P line would not 'slide' along the inner line to allow me to do that. You can see I tried several times. And tried to draw a perpendicular from other lines. After I closed the drawing and re-opened it, it worked just as it should!
Cheers and best regards – George