Drafting Settings Part 5 -- Quick Properties

All right, we've reached the last tab in the Drafting Settings dialog! Welcome to Quick Properties.

In case you haven't seen Quick Properties palette yet, it's a miniaturized version of the full Properties palette that pops up when you select an object in your drawing. It looks something like this:

Of course, you can customize this palette to best suit the way you work. If you couldn't change some settings, we wouldn't be talking about it, would we? So here are the Quick Properties settings:

Like every other tab we've seen, this one has an on/off checkbox right at the top. Right below it, though, is an interesting setting specifying precisely when it comes on. You can choose to have Quick Properties displayed for every object, or only for "defined" objects. A "defined" object is one that has some of its object-specific properties chosen for use as quick properties. Object types that are not "defined" would show only color, layer, and linetype.

Where you do you define these objects? Take a look back at the shot of the Quick Properties palette, and look for the icon in the upper-right corner, next to the object type name. That's the Customize button, and it takes you directly to the part of the CUI editor where you can select which objects have Quick Properties at all, and what those properties are. It looks like this:

 

So here, a selected circle will display its radius and area, but not its diameter, in the Quick Properties palette. To add one more level of customization to this, you can choose which object types appear in the left-hand list using the button at the top of the image above. You can probably identify which properties are most important to you in a short swing through this dialog.

Under "Location Modes", you can choose where on your screen you want the palette to appear. "Float" means that it will appear in the same place every time, just like a regular palette. "Cursor" means that it will pop up next to your crosshairs, whereever they are on the screen. If you choose Cursor, you can also further specify the position by quadrant (top-right, top-left, bottom-right, bottom-left) and by the distance (in pixels) that the palette will stay away from the cursor.

Finally, you can control the size of the palette with the Auto-Collapse option. If you turn on Auto-Collapse, you only see a few rows of the palette -- you can choose how many -- until you hover your cursor over it. If Auto-Collapse is off, you see all available quick properties immediately. If you are more likely to use Quick Properties to view object information, you might find Auto-Collapse helpful, but if you are more likely to use it to make changes to object properties, you may find that Auto-Collapse is more cumbersome (because you have to wait for it to unroll before you can make your changes). In the end, it's up to you.

Well, I think that's the end of what I have to say about the Drafting Settings dialog. Thanks for hanging in for the full tour. I hope you learned a few new things (I did!), and that you'll be able to use a few of them to be more productive.