Reverse Line Direction

Another of the tiny-yet-amazingly-helpful new commands in AutoCAD LT 2010 is Reverse. Available either as a stand-alone command (on the Modify panel of the Home tab) or as an option inside the Polyline Edit and Spline Edit commands, Reverse was added to help you control the display of linetypes that contain text or symbols.

For most linetypes (Hidden, Dashdot, etc.), it doesn't matter whether they go up or down, backwards or forwards -- they'll still look the same. For linetypes that contain text or symbols, though, the direction makes a big difference in readability. If objects with these linetypes are drawn left-to-right, the text comes in right-side up. But if they're drawn right-to-left, the text shows upside down.

In this screenshot, the "Gas" line is clearly upside down -- it would be much more readable if the text were right-side up.

No problem. Just start the Reverse command, select the line, and it gets flipped so that the text is readable.

Objects that can be reversed include lines, polylines, and splines. There's no "global" option -- you have to specify which objects to reverse -- but it sure beats swapping endpoints one object at a time!

Comments

[James Walker]

Is this feature only available on CAD 2010?
If I am not mistaken it is not on my 2088 version, but it is a handy little tool.

[Kate Morrical]

Yes, this will be a new feature in AutoCAD LT 2010.