LT Unlimited

Control your tray settings

I was printing a drawing the other day (repeatedly), and finally got tired of closing the little “successful plot” notification window:

Fortunately, I remembered there’s a way to make the bubble disappear all by itself. I right-clicked on the Status Bar and chose Tray Settings.

In that dialog, I changed the setting from “display until closed” to “display time 5 seconds”.

Ahhh, success. Now I still get the little windows/bubbles to let me know that everything worked (this also controls notifications for situations like changes to an external reference), but they’ll fade quietly away after I’ve had a chance to see them.

If you’d like a shorter or longer display time, you can choose from anywhere between 1 and 10 seconds, or you can even turn notifications off entirely. (A “notification” is the bubble window; an “icon” is, for example, the little printer icon that appears in the status bar while a plot job is processing.)

Twitter Tip of the Day: Lines tangent to circles

Today I've got a link for you to another blog post, but I initially saw it come through on Twitter, so that counts, right?

Josh Jones, a.k.a. @lazydrafter, wrote up a tip for connecting two circles with a line tangent to both of them.

Read and enjoy!

Getting the most out of the Properties palette

I've got a quasi-guest post for you today, courtesy of Paul Munford of The CAD Setter Out. ("Quasi" because I'm going to give you a link, not quote the whole thing.) Last week, after I mentioned using the Properties palette to modify text masks, Paul sent in a link to his in-depth exploration of the Properties palette.

My favorite tip was about undoing the changes you make with the palette:

If you make a lot of edits with the Properties palette, and then go back into AutoCAD and run the ‘undo’ command, all of your edits may undo at once. To undo one change at a time, remain with the Properties palette open, right click anywhere over the palette and choose ‘Undo’.

But there's plenty more where that came from–read the whole thing to brush up on all this palette can do!

Viewport Macros

Looking for some time-saving shortcuts for your everyday work? CAD Notes has a post today from Paul Munford of the CAD Setter Out with 11 macros for working with viewports.

Read the article

Paul suggests putting the macros on a tool palette, as seen on the right, but of course you can put a macro on all kinds of interface elements, including ribbon panels, toolbars, and pull-down menus.

Got your own click-saving macros you’d like to share? Send ‘em on in, and I’ll feature them here too.

Unable to Modify Objects

I’ve posted about PICKFIRST before, but it’s one of those annoying variables that’s hard to find if you don’t know what you’re looking for. So I’m putting this up in the hope of providing some SEO-friendly keywords (that’s “search engine optimized”) for people who find themselves yelling at their drawings.

If you can select objects, but not modify them (they get deselected when you start a command), check your PICKFIRST setting before you’re tempted to throw your computer out the window. :-)

Another random system variable

A couple weeks ago I got an IM from a colleague with an AutoCAD puzzle: Hatches refused to show up in a drawing. The command looked like it worked just fine, but the end result was nothing. All layers were on & thawed. Hmm…

I finally landed on the answer: FILLMODE. It had been set to 0, causing hatches, polylines, and 2D solids to appear empty. It took me a few minutes to figure it out, mainly because I forgot that FILLMODE can affect hatches—I thought it was only for polylines.

But I eventually remembered, and hopefully now you will too.

Match (Specific) Properties

You’ve probably used the MATCHPROP command for years to transfer one object’s properties to another’s, maybe to fix a mistake or modify a copy.

But did you know you can choose which properties to match? You don’t have to use them all!

The Settings option inside Match Properties is a little hidden, since it doesn’t show up until after you’ve selected the source object. But once you’ve found it, you get a whole bunch of choices.

As you see, everything’s checked by default, but you can remove any property you like just by unchecking it.

The top half of the dialog is dedicated to universal properties like color and linetype. In the bottom half are special objects with unique characteristics—for example, checking the “Dimension” and “Text” boxes transfers an object’s style and annotative properties along with the checked general properties.

After checking this out, you may decide to leave everything checked, or get rid of all but a few important properties…it’s up to you.

Happy matching!

Select Similar – Examples Wanted

I was presenting AutoCAD 2012 at an event yesterday, and demonstrated “Add Selected” and “Select Similar.” The audience seemed to think they were useful features, until one woman asked me for an example of why you would use “Select Similar.”

I’m embarrassed to say it, but I drew a blank. :-\ Fortunately somebody else suggested putting incorrectly drawn objects—like dimensions or blocks—on the correct layer.

But I *know* there have to be other examples, so I’m turning this over to you. When do you use “Select Similar”? Help me out, so I can answer this question properly the next time it comes up. :-)

New Previews for Fillets and Chamfers

Have you ever started the Fillet or Chamfer command, made two quick clicks, and realized too late that you had the wrong radius or distance? Yeah, me too.

To help keep that from happening – because who likes to redo work? -- AutoCAD LT 2012 added a preview to both the Fillet and Chamfer commands.

Now, after you pick your first object, you can hover your cursor over another object to see what the resulting arc or bevel will look like:

If it’s the wrong size, you can type R for radius (or get it from the dynamic input drop-down) and enter a new value.

And if you’re using the Polyline option of either command (which applies the fillet or chamfer to all segments of a polyline at once), you get previews of all the new corners just by hovering the cursor over a polyline.

 

Again, if you need to change the fillet radius or chamfer distance/angle, you can do it here, before you finish the command and need to undo and redo it.

More Multifunctional Grips

Multifunctional grips first showed up (in very basic form) for hatches in AutoCAD LT 2010. They were improved in AutoCAD LT 2011 and extended to polylines, and now they’ve gone even farther in AutoCAD LT 2012.

I already showed you one example in the UCS icon post, but you’ll also find multifunctional grips on lines, arcs, elliptical arcs, dimensions, and multileaders. For some objects, you’ll see different options depending on which grip you hover over.

Before we start our tour of the new grips, here’s a refresher on how they work.

• Hovering over an eligible grip brings up the multifunctional menu.
• You can use the arrow keys or the mouse to pick an item from the list.
• If you just left-click on the grip instead, you can use Ctrl to cycle through the available modes.
• You can also use the space bar after left-clicking to cycle through the standard grip-editing modes of Move, Copy, Rotate, Scale, and Mirror.
• And if you make it all the way back to Stretch (after Mirror), you can use Ctrl again to access the multifunctional behavior.

Now, here’s where you’ll find the new grips.

Lines

The middle grip is not multifunctional.

Arcs

  

Notice that the old “double-grips” with both an arrow and a square are gone. That’s because you can access both functions from the multifunctional grip. The center grip is not multifunctional.

Elliptical Arcs

These grips are a little funny. The only time you’ll actually see a multifunctional menu is if your elliptical arc ends at a quadrant – 0, 90, 270, or 360 degrees. Then, you can either stretch the axis or lengthen the arc.

Otherwise, the end grip will be a non-multifunctional arrow that will lengthen the arc, like you see on the left end of the arc above, and the quadrant grips will just show the lengths of the axes. If you left click on a quadrant grip, you can change the axis length either with the mouse or by entering a new distance.

Dimensions

 

For dimensions, some of the options that were previously in the right-click shortcut menu are now in multifunctional grips.

Multileaders

 

A couple things to note here. “Lengthen Landing” leave the text where it is, unlike the arrow grip which shifts the note. Also, “Add Vertex” lets you specify a new location for the arrowhead, adding a segment between it and the existing grip. This is different from polylines, where new vertices are added between existing ones.