LT Unlimited

Quick Way to Close the Enhanced Attribute Editor

In the old Attribute Editor, the only ways to get out of it were to either click the OK button or Tab over until it was highlighted and then press Enter. Not too bad, unless you're A) a keyboard junkie and/or B) editing the first attribute in a block that has twenty.

But in the Enhanced Attribute Editor (long available in AutoCAD, now included in AutoCAD LT 2010), there's an even easier way: Ctrl+Enter.

Just like the Mtext Editor, that handy two-key shortcut closes the dialog and saves your changes. Of course, clicking OK and Tab-Enter-ing over to OK still work too, but in my opinion Ctrl+Enter is faster than both.

Action Bars in the Block Editor

Prior to AutoCAD LT 2010, it could be difficult to tell in the Block Editor which actions, parameters, and objects were related. For example, look at this steel beam section, as seen in the AutoCAD LT 2009 Block Editor:

It's a mess -- actions everywhere, labels overlapping...yes, it could be laid out better, but even so there's no easy way to tell which actions affect which parameters.

Now look at the same block in the AutoCAD LT 2010 Block Editor:

Ahh...much better! Now, all the actions have been consolidated into Action Bars, so that all the actions for a given parameter are nicely grouped together. The icon tells you what type of action it is, and hovering over an icon gives you the action's name and highlights its parameter.

Even better, you don't have to do anything special to use Action Bars -- all your dynamic blocks will automatically display this way when you edit them in LT 2010.

Control Ribbon Height

In AutoCAD LT 2009 and 2010, all the built-in ribbon panels are the same height, so no matter which tab you're on, the overall height of the ribbon remains the same.

But if you make your own panels, you get to decide how tall they are by controlling the number of rows you use and the size of the icons. If you want a long skinny ribbon panel with just one row of tools, you can do it.

When the ribbon is undocked or floating, you can easily resize it just like you would any other palette. But when it's docked (as it is by default), changing the height is a little different.

In LT 2009, the ribbon automatically resized itself to accommodate the largest panel on the tab, whether it was one row tall or many. You didn't have any control over how much real estate it actually took up. In LT 2010, though, a new variable was introduced to keep the ribbon at a constant height, independent of the size of the panels.

This variable is called RIBBONDOCKEDHEIGHT, and it can be set anywhere between 0 and 500, where the number represents the height of the ribbon in pixels. The default is 100, which is a good size for accommodating the built-in set of panels. If you have a tabs with smaller or larger panels, though, you might want to experiment with different heights until your layout looks the way you want it to. (Note: the ribbon won't ever get smaller than necessary to accommodate the largest panel on the tab. So setting RIBBONDOCKEDHEIGHT to 50 doesn't have much effect on the built-in configurations, since the panels themselves are larger than 50 pixels.)

And if you'd rather just have the ribbon resize itself automatically, set the variable to 0.

Contextual Ribbon Tab States

When the ribbon was introduced in LT 2009, it included a limited number of contextual tabs, which are tabs that appear only when a certain command is active or a certain object is selected.

LT 2010 expanded on this idea, adding more built-in states and enabling you to personalize several others. Here's how it works.

In the CUI Editor, under the Ribbon node, you'll find a list of possible Contextual Tab States. Most of them are in the format "<Object> selected", although there are a few "<Environment> mode" and "<Command> in progress" states as well.

For each state, you can assign one or more tabs to appear, either as a separate tab or merged with whatever tab is active at the time.

As an example, let's take a look at the "Block Editor mode" state.

It has two tabs in it, the "Block Editor Contextual Tab" and the "Block Editor - Close Contextual Merged Tab". The first tab is set to display type "full". That means that it gets a separate green-shaded tab next to the others (like Home and Annotate), and hides its tools when it's not in use.

 The second contextual tab, though, is set to "merged", which means it gets tacked on to the end of the active tab. Notice that the "Close Block Editor" panel is still visible in the image below, even though the main Block Editor tab isn't active.

A bunch of states are pre-populated with tabs:

• Block Editor mode
• DGN Underlay selected
• DWF Underlay selected
• External Reference selected
• Image selected
• PDF Underlay selected
• Reference Editing mode
• Table cell(s) selected
• Test Block mode
• Text Editor in progress

But the rest are ready and waiting for you to define your own. And fortunately, doing so is pretty simple. All you need to do is drag-and-drop the tab you want onto the appropriate state. So I can drag the Home tab over to the "Arc selected" state...

...and like magic, the Home tab appears when I select an arc, no matter what tab was current before.

(Yes, it does actually appear twice. No big deal, since the green one will go away as soon as the arc is deselected.)

You can also easily create your own tabs to further personalize the tools in your contextual tab states. Just right-click on the Tabs node, select "New Tab", and drag-and-drop panels onto it until you have the tools you need. Then drag-and-drop your new tab onto a contextual tab state.

For example, I made a new tab that I called "Modify Properties", and added the Modify and Properties panels to it. (Creative naming, hmm?) I also set its Display Type property to Merge, so that it would combine itself with whatever tab is active, and dropped it into the "Circle selected" state. Now see what happens when I select a circle:

See how the two panels I added to my contextual tab just appear next to whatever panels belong to teh actual current tab? Pretty neat, isn't it? It's a super-quick and easy way to make the ribbon work for you.

Virtual Imagine Tour tomorrow -- sign up today!

If you haven't had a chance to see the 2010 family of products in action yet, tomorrow may be your chance!

We hold an Imagine tour every year in various cities around North America. This year's tour was scaled a bit -- although there are still a few events left -- so the online event is going to be even bigger. Check out the schedule and sign up here.

Here's a quick run-down:
When: May 19th, 7:00 to 5:00 Pacific
Where: Your computer! (Sign up here.)
What: Webcasts, chat sessions, a virtual exhibit hall with vendor and product booths...TONS of Autodesk and other CAD-related people to talk to and ask questions.

Some sessions my readers may be particularly interested in:
9:00 Pacific: Take Design Further: Lynn Allen's AutoCAD 2010 Tips & Techniques (30-minute webcast)
10:00 Pacific: AutoCAD LT 2010: PDF output and underlays (30-minute chat)
10:30 Pacific: 3D Conceptual Design inside AutoCAD 2010 (30-minute webcast, see what all the fuss is about)
1:00 Pacific: Straight Talk about AutoCAD 2010 Benefits (30-minute chat)

Did you like how I snuck the LT session in there? Of course it's hosted by yours truly, so if you have questions about the new PDF functionality in AutoCAD LT 2010 (or about anything else in LT 2010...or if you just want to say hi), sign up and stop on by!

See you tomorrow!

AutoCAD LT 2009 Update 3 released

Update 3 for AutoCAD LT 2009 was released today and is available for download here.

There are separate downloads for the 32-bit and 64-bit versions, so make sure you grab the right one.

For more details, check out the ReadMe or Shaan Hurley's summary over on Between the Lines.

Measure Geometry Hotfix Posted

A Hotfix has been posted for the Measure Geometry (MEASUREGEOM) command in the AutoCAD 2010 family of products, including of course AutoCAD LT 2010. Apparently, if your cursor is partly off-screen when you run the command, your program may crash, and this hotfix fixes that.

(For more on the Measure Geometry command, see these two previous posts on measuring distances and areas.)

A big reason we were able to find and fix this problem is the Customer Error Reporting (CER) program -- the little dialog that pops up when AutoCAD LT crashes, asking if you want to send a report to Autodesk. Although in an ideal world you'd never see this dialog, crashes do happen, and the best way to see if there's a fix for whatever caused your crash is to send in the CER. If you put your e-mail in, you'll be notified when a fix (like this one) becomes available.

Every single CER is read and researched and is an invaluable part of bug fixes and diagnostics. So, next time you have the opportunity to send one in, please do! (But here's hoping there aren't too many "next times".)

Customize the Quick Access Toolbar

 

The Quick Access toolbar was introduced in LT 2009 as another way of putting the commands you need where you need them.

Adding commands to the QAT in LT 2009 was pretty easy -- right-click on the toolbar, choose Customize, and drag-and-drop the commands you need from the list that appears. Getting them off the toolbar, though, was a little more difficult. You had to go through the full-blown CUI editor -- not necessarily ideal, especially if you just grabbed the wrong command by mistake. (For more on the QAT in LT 2009, check out this post.)

In LT 2010, the Quick Access toolbar has grown up a lot, with several new ways to add and remove commands quickly and easily.

First up, there's a new flyout menu at the end of the toolbar containing several popular commands. Just check or un-check the tools you want to display or hide.

The second way to add a command is probably my favorite: just right-click on a ribbon icon and choose "Add to Quck Access Toolbar".

Finally, you can right-click on the QAT itself and choose "Customize Quick Access Toolbar", which brings up the same command list you saw in LT 2009.

 

Notice the other options in this menu as well. The first one provides an easy way to take a tool off the QAT -- no more going through the CUI editor.

The second option enables you to add a separator between icons, to help you organize your tools.

Lastly, you can use the final option to move the QAT below the ribbon, in case you like it better there.

Lots of stuff happening on the web today

First off, today's the last day to vote for your favorite Autodesk University sessions. Click here to vote, and don't forget to vote for my class. :-)

Second, the AutoCAD Product Design and Usability teams are looking for your input on object transparency support. Click here to tell us what you think -- the survey will be up until May 15th.

Finally, for my educationally-minded readers, AutoCAD 2010 is now among the products available free to students on the Autodesk Student Community. Registration is free, but you do need a valid, school-issued email address or an invitation from a faculty member to participate.

So vote today -- make your opinion heard!

Convert Spline to Polyline

Splines can be useful objects in a drawing, but sometimes you need to edit them with tools that apply to polylines instead. AutoCAD LT 2010 includes a function to enable you to convert a spline into a polyline so you can edit away.

You can find this function in two places: the Edit Spline command and the Edit Polyline command. It doesn't matter which one you choose; Edit Polyline just adds an extra prompt at the beginning to confirm that you want to make the conversion.

So here's the original spline:

When I start the Convert function, I'm prompted for a precision. This number can be anywhere from 0 to 99, with a higher number generating more fit points. As you'll see, low numbers tend to work pretty well.

Here's the spline after being converted with a precision of 10:

Pretty close, right? But this polyline only consists of straight-line segments. You can get an even better fit with an even lower precision value if you choose to create a poyline consisting of arc segments instead. This is controlled by the PLINECONVERTMODE variable -- 0 means straight lines and 1 means arcs.

Here's the spline again, after being converted with PLINECONVERTMODE set to 1 and a precision of 2:

You'll probably want to play around with different combinations of precisions and conversion modes to see what will work best for your own splines.

P.S. I promise there are differences between the last two images and the first! I know it's hard to spot here, but I wanted to show how well the conversion works. Try converting a spline with PLINECONVERTMODE = 0 and a precision of 0 and you'll see the "least accurate" version.