LT Unlimited

Announcing the Second AutoCAD LT Webcast!

That's, right the second-ever webcast targeted specifically at LT users is coming up this Thursday, October 2nd at 10:00 am PDT.

I'll be covering all things annotation-related, from simple text objects through dimensions, tables, and fields.

Here's the link to register -- hope to see you there!

New Tutorials Available on YouTube

I've been working on a series of video tutorials, hoping that they'd be a helpful addition to the learning materials. Their final destination will be somewhere on the Autodesk LT site, but while we work out those details I've put them up on YouTube for a preview.

I know the quality's not the best (there's not a lot you can do with that resolution), but it should give you an idea. And of course the final postings will be of a higher quality.

Tutorials

And while you're there, you can check out the new features demos if you haven't already.

New Features Demos

AutoCAD LT 2009 Update 2 Released

Update 2 for LT 2009 was released yesterday, and is available here.

It looks like there are a ton of feature updates in this one:

• Annotation Scaling
• Blocks
• HATCH
• LAYER
• Menu Browser
• OPEN/SAVE
• PLOT
• Properties Palette
• PUBLISH

Details on the updates are in the README, although the one that I think most people will be interested in is the fix for PUBLISHCOLLATE (fixes the problem where only the first sheet of a publish set would plot).

Modifying Multileaders

Multileaders have to be one of my favorite new features from the last few releases. (Okay, I'll admit it, I have a lot of favorite features, but multileaders are high on the list.)

Unlike the Leaders and QLeaders, Multileaders are single objects -- the text is permanently attached to the arrow. With this new format comes a whole host of other options:

Obviously the large button creates a new multileader. The first two small buttons enable you to quickly add or remove an extra arrow for the the multileader -- it's easier than ever to have the same note point to two (or more) different places! The next two buttons have commands to align the ends of several multileaders (for those of you whole like to line all your notes up nice and neat), and to collect sevearl multileaders into one note. (This last one only works if the content type for the multileader is set to Block -- you can't collect text-containing multileaders.)

Customize the Status Bar with MODEMACRO

Did you know that there's an area of the status bar that you can use to display your own custom messages in AutoCAD LT? It's right where the red arrow is pointing in the image below (yes, I know it's blank now), and it's controlled by the system variable MODEMACRO.

According to Help, you can "use MODEMACRO to display a string of text, or use special text strings written in the DIESEL macro language to have the macro evaluated from time to time and base the status line on user-selected conditions."

That sounds kind of complicated, but it's really pretty simple. Re-wording it doesn't really help (I tried), so the best way to show you is with a couple of examples.

Here's how you would display a static message using MODEMACRO:
Before:

And after:

Pretty cool, huh? Although static messages are kind of boring, so how about one that uses a DIESEL expression to retrieve the current text style:

The image is small (although you can click on it to see the full-size version), so here's the input:

Style: $(getvar, textstyle)

The "Style: " part will always stay the same, but the DIESEL expression -- the part that starts with $ -- will update dynamically as you change the style.

You don't even have to stop there -- you can put together as many of these expressions as will fit in 255 characters. Just replace "textstyle" with your system variable of choice and "style" with some other descriptive word.

If any of my blog readers are using this in their setup, I'd love to hear about it -- drop me an e-mail with the link on the left.

User Variables in DIESEL Macros

Today's tip was submitted by Chris McVey of Resource Engineering, Inc.

Chris is the CAD Manager for his firm, and has this to say about user variables in LT:

Another tip for power LT users: User variables USERI1-5 and USERR1-5 will be stored in the drawing. These can be read with DIESEL. This is handy to create a macro button that calls a script. This macro can read the value of these variables and pick the correct script based on that value. It makes your macro "smart" and allows on button to do multiple things. Add to that a check on dimscale, cvports, etc and you begin to get some powerful macro tools.

Thanks for the tip, Chris!

Help Shape the Future of AutoCAD LT

Here's yet another chance to speak directly to us, and tell us what you like about LT, what you don't like, and what you wish it did! From Lisa Crounse, the LT Product Manager:

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I am very excited to announce that we have just set up a special private discussion group just for AutoCAD LT users as part of the Autodesk MyFeedback program.  The “Team AutoCAD LT” discussion will be a forum for discussing product ideas amongst fellow users and offering your advice to the AutoCAD LT team in a private setting.   

This forum will run until the end of December, 2008.  All discussions and information is considered confidential, so you’ll have the opportunity to speak your mind (and we will listen).

I hope you will take this opportunity to participate.  Instructions for signing up are below. Feel free to tell your colleagues and co-workers about this program.  The more voices, the better!

Lisa

HOW TO JOIN
If you have not previously participated in MyFeedback beta programs with Autodesk – To join the AutoCAD LT discussion group, please go to http://myfeedback.autodesk.com and click on the “Sign up” link located in the upper left hand side navigation panel.  Fill out the requested information and be sure to include the code “LT2008Panel” in the “Beta Code” field at the top of the form.  Don’t forget to hit the “Submit” button at the bottom to submit your application for review. You should receive a response within a few days.

If you have participated in My Feedback beta programs with Autodesk – To join the AutoCAD LT discussion group program login into http://myfeedback.autodesk.com and click the User button located at the top center of the page to update your profile. Please add “LT2008Panel” in the beta code field of your profile and save your changes. You should receive a response within a few days.
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I hope that if you're reading this, you'll consider signing up -- we'd love to get some good discussions going!

Meet the AU 2008 General Design Keynote Speaker

There will be a variety of industry keynote speakers at AU this year, but I'm especially looking forward to the General Design session, where the speaker will be Eddie Paul, known as Hollywood's best-kept secret. Eddie create 3D sharks (among other things) for TV and movies, using a variety of Autodesk products, but particularly AutoCAD.

Shaan Hurley (of Between the Lines fame) did an interview with Eddie recently, and it's posted as part of the AU Beat podcast series. If you haven't listened to the AU Beat yet, it's a fun collections of interviews and musings from several top-rated AU presenters and Autodesk insiders.

Using Templates to Start a Drawing

When you start a new drawing, you probably want it to contain a bunch of things to help you get started -- layers, text/dimension/table styles, maybe even a title block or border.

Now, it's easy enough to put things like these in a regular drawing file, which you could open up and re-save every time you needed a new drawing. But this method has one big draw-back -- having to re-save! I can't think how many times I've opened a file, meaning to use "Save As" to create a new file, only to get wrapped up in making changes before I do it. Next thing I know, I've hit Ctrl+S (force of habit!) and now I've overwritten my original file. Oops.

Fortunately, there's an easy way around this. Go ahead and create a drawing with all your building blocks in it, but when you save it, save it as a Drawing Template, with a DWT extension. Next, point the Template Settings path in the Options dialog, Files tab, to the folder where you saved the DWT.

Now, when you start a new drawing, the New File dialog will open in that folder, enabling you to select your template as your starting point. Best of all, it opens as Drawing1 (or whatever number is next in sequence), making it virtually impossible to accidentally save over your template. Of course you can re-save it manually, by changing the file type again, but Ctrl+S won't surprise you.

In your office, you might be able to just have one template, or you may need several, depending on how many sets of CAD standards you have to follow. Either way, it's an easy way to keep your settings straight.

Control Size & Rotation of Text in an Editor

When you're editing text and mtext in AutoCAD LT, the program automatically enlarges (or reduces) and rotates the text so that you can easily see it and read it. (So a very small piece of vertically-oriented text would become temporarily large and horizontal.)

If you don't want LT to do this (maybe you're really good at reading upside down), you can change the value of MTEXTFIXED to 0 or 1 -- it's set to 2 by default.

One small catch -- if you're not using the In-Place Editor (if MTEXTED is set to OldEditor), then rotated text is always displayed horizontally. In this case, MTEXTFIXED only affects the display size of the text as it's being edited.