Announcing AutoCAD LT 2011!

That’s right, the purpose of today’s webcast (9 a.m. Pacific, noon Eastern, http://www.autodesk.com/webcast) is to announce the launch of the AutoCAD 2011 family of products – including (of course) AutoCAD LT!

You can bet I’ll be blogging a lot in the upcoming days and weeks about all the new features, but here’s my top 5 list for today:

• Transparent objects and layers (way cool!)
• Grips for polyline editing (super fast!)
• Hatch grips and contextual tabs (dialog? what dialog?)
• Create objects based on existing objects (“current layer” could be practically obsolete!)
• Text in linetypes is always right-side up (so long to the “reverse” command)

If you can’t wait for me to blog about all these features, you can watch the demo videos on my YouTube channel.

And if that’s still not enough, you can download a free 30-day trial and try out the new features for yourself.

In addition to the webcast, we’re having an all-day event with some well-known AutoCAD bloggers:

• Michael Beall ~ http://www.cadtutor.net/corner/
• Brian Benton ~ http://CAD-a-Blog.com
• David Cohn ~ http://cadman-do.blogspot.com/
• Donnie Gladfelter ~ http://www.thecadgeek.com/
• Mark Kiker ~ http://www.caddmanager.com/CMB/
• RK McSwain ~ http://cadpanacea.com/
• Melanie Perry ~ http://mistressofthedorkness.blogspot.com/
• Curt Moreno ~ http://www.kungfudrafter.com/
• Barry Ralphs ~ http://www.opendcl.com
• Dean Saadallah ~ http://LTisACAD.blogspot.com

That means there will soon be plenty of independent reviews of AutoCAD 2011 and AutoCAD LT 2011 up on the internet for your perusal. (Autodesk may have sponsored our bloggers’ visit, but as always they’re free to say whatever they think about our products.)

I’ll have more on the event tomorrow, but if that’s not soon enough for you, I’ll also be twittering throughout the day with updates, news, and whatever else I think might be interesting.

So, get ready for AutoCAD LT 2011! I think you’ll like it!

Comments

[Quinn]

Hello,
I download and tried LT 2011 and I found that:

0. The performance is very poor when selecting a non-associative hatch having islands.
To reproduce, set GRIPOBJLIMIT=0 (all grips are selected) and draw a big rectangle.
Inside it draw a closed concave polyline of 10-15 edges (lines and arcs), like a steel wide beam profile.
Array the polyline 10x10, all inside the rectangle.
Hatch the rectangle with a non-associative hatch. Will result 1 hatch with 100 islands.
Select the hatch. It takes 7-8 seconds that the hatch to be selected (!?!).

In order to avoid this delay a new variable HATCHGRIP (saved in the drawing) can be added.
HATCHGRIP=0 for 2008 behavior (1 grip for each hatch entity).
HATCHGRIP=1 for 2011 behavior (grips for all hatch edges).
In order to make the AutoCAD speedy, any user can work currently with HATCHGRIP=0 and, when it needs to edit a hatch by grips, can turn it on temporary by setting HATCHGRIP=1.

1. Draw 2 polylines, overlapped and identical.
Select them. The grips are shown.
Do realtime pan or zoom (using wheelmouse) => gray "+" signs appears at the middle of the polyline segments (!?!).

This happens also with a closed polyline hatched with a non-associative hatch, when both are selected.

2. Turn OTRACK off. Turn OSNAP on.
Set OSNAP "perpendicular" and/or "extension".
Draw a line => at the second point, otrack small cross and temporary line appears, even if OTRACK is off (!?!).

3. Start drawing a revision cloud.
The aperture is displayed even if APBOX=0 (!?!).

4. Draw something.
Set GRIPOBJLIMIT=0 (all grips are visible).
Select using mouse => grips are displayed.
Select using QuickSelect => no grips are displayed (!?!).

5. Create a new drawing.
Make a new layer called 1, having red color.
You will have 2 layers = 0 (white) and 1 (red).
Draw a line. Select it and assign layer 1 to it.
Layer 0 = current.
Select the line. In the layer dropbox, layer 1 is displayed.
Type copy, move or rotate command. Enter => in the layer dropbox, layer 0 is displayed (!?!) even if in color dropdown box ByLayer is red.

6. BEDIT > the window has the correct thumbnail preview.
REFEDIT > the window has a very small thumbnail preview (!?!).

7. Purge window => "Purge all" icon is the old 2004 DWG icon (!?!).

This is a list which cames only after 2 hours of testing !!!

[Kate Morrical]

Thank you for your feedback. I'll pass it along to our Q/A team.