LT Unlimited

Drag Text Into Drawing

Found this in the tip archives yesterday:

You can drag-and-drop a TXT file from Windows Explorer into a drawing file to insert its contents as an mtext object.

Convenient, eh?

AutoCAD WS Facecast Today

We have our third “Facecast” (Facebook+webcast) today at 9 am Pacific, and it’s all about AutoCAD WS. See a short presentation from the product managers about our newest web & mobile viewing, editing, and collaboration platform, then ask your questions live!

You can watch the ‘cast on Facebook at the AutoCAD fan page, from your iPhone with the Livestream app (get it from the App Store and look for the AutoCAD channel) or even right here on the blog.

It probably says “offline” right now, but come back at 9 am Pacific / noon Eastern when the show will start. See you then!

Watch live streaming video from autocad at livestream.com

Facelift for the Group Command

This is kind of a sneaky “new features” post, because Groups are by no stretch of the imagination “new”. They’ve been around since…well, I’m not exactly sure how long. Essentially forever, or at least that’s what it feels like.

But in AutoCAD LT 2012, the Group feature has been revamped and been given a place of prominence on the Home tab.

If you’re a long-time groups user, this change just makes it that much easier to find the commands you’re used to. And if you’ve never used groups before…it makes it that much easier to find a “new” command. (Sort of like styles in Word. I never used them before they were put front and center on the Word ribbon—and now I never create a document without them.)

So, what is a group, anyway? It’s a collection of objects that you can select and manipulate as a unit. It’s sort of like a block, except a group is easier to create and un-create, doesn’t have to have a name, and is designed for temporary use in a single drawing.

These days, all you have to do to create a group is click on the largest icon in the Groups panel, select your objects, and finish. Then, when you select any of the objects in the group, they’re all selected.

Here’s a before-and-after screenshot:

 

Notice that the group now has a single center grip, and a gray “bounding box” around the outside edge. (The bounding box is easiest to see where it crosses the door to the cubicle, but trust me, it goes all the way around.)

You can move, copy, scale, rotate, or mirror this group without having to select each object every time.

But what if you want to make some changes to the group—add or remove objects, or change the position of individual items? Look back up at the panel.

The icon in the top right is for Ungroup, which the group version of Explode. It just removes the group association so you can select everything individually.

Below that is Group Edit, which lets you add objects to the group or remove objects from it.

At the bottom is Group Selection, which determines whether objects remember their group association or not. If you turn it off, it’s as if the group doesn’t exist. You can make any kind of modifications to the objects in the group, and when you turn Group Selection back on, the original association is restored.

Personally, though, using Group Selection seems a little extreme to me. I think it’s a little risky to pretend you don’t have any groups at all in your drawing when you do—you might be surprised by some results down the road.

Instead, I’d rather use something on the expanded portion of the Groups panel: the Bounding Box:

When it’s on, as it is in the image on the right above, selecting a group results in a single grip with the light gray outline around all the objects.

When it’s off, selecting any single item in the group selects all the items, but they still have all their grips visible. It would look the same as in the image above on the left. That way, you can use grip-edit methods to modify individual items, but general commands like Move and Rotate would still work on the group as a whole.

What do you think—will this new Groups panel make you more likely to incorporate groups into your workflow?

Get Current with Rebate Offers for AutoCAD LT 2012

If you’re considering purchasing new seats or upgrade licenses for AutoCAD LT 2012, listen up. There’s currently a rebate being offered for both new and upgrade licenses -- $400 and $200 off MSRP, respectively. It’s even available for Inventor LT and Inventor LT suite (which includes AutoCAD LT), which is great if you’re interested in testing the 3D mechanical design waters.

Click here for details…and if you can’t remember all of the new and improved features that we’ve added to AutoCAD LT, especially since 2009…well, that’s what the blog archives are for. :-)

Update 2 for AutoCAD LT 2011

Update 2 for AutoCAD LT 2011 was released earlier this week. You can get 32- and 64-bit versions here or from the Communication Center.

It is recommended that you review the ReadMe before installing any updates.

Also, please note that Update 2 does not include Update 1.1, so you should install that before you install Update 2.

You can find Update 1.1 here.

Blend Objects

A new command has been added to the Fillet drop-down in AutoCAD LT 2012.

BLEND is related to FILLET and CHAMFER, but it creates smooth splines between objects instead of lines or arcs.

Before and after:

     

The shape of the spline is almost entirely determined by the position and angle of the two objects it’s connecting.

You do have a choice of continuity, though: Tangent, which creates “a degree 3 spline with tangency (G1) continuity”; and Smooth, which creates “a degree 5 spline with curvature (G3) continuity”. The method you choose will affect the shape of the spline at least slightly, so unless you know in advance which one you need you can try both to see which one you like better.

New Product Support Blog

You may have already seen the Installation & Licensing board over at the Autodesk discussion forums. It’s staffed by Autodesk support techs, so it’s a great place to get your questions answered.

Now, some of our installation & licensing specialists have set up a new blog to go along with it, Up and Ready.

Installing AutoCAD LT is usually pretty straightforward, since there aren’t any license servers to worry about, but if you manage other products as well, it might be worth it to bookmark this new blog too.

Tweak to Snap Behavior

I know a lot of you reading this probably don’t use Snap (toggled by F9) much, preferring instead to rely on Object Snaps. But for those of you who do, you’ll notice a change to Snap behavior in AutoCAD LT 2012.

Now, Snap only kicks in when you’re specifying points. If you’re just moving the cursor around the drawing, you can move it as freely as you could if Snap weren’t on. But as soon as you’re ready to enter a distance or pick a point—whether you’re grip-editing something or using a regular command—Snap kicks in and restricts you to defined intervals.

This makes it easier to select objects in your drawing (since you don’t have to work as hard to get your cursor precisely over an object), while still giving you the Snap-based precision you need.

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.

Change to Quick Properties

Quick Properties has been around since AutoCAD LT 2009, but it’s received a few tweaks since then, the biggest of which happened this year.

When you double-click an object, you now get Quick Properties instead of the full Properties palette (unless that object has a different double-click action already). In keeping with this change, the QP palette was also revamped so that it shows you the most relevant properties for that object.

Here’s what you get when you double-click on a circle:

By contrast, in AutoCAD LT 2011, you only saw color, layer, and linetype. All the other information was hidden by the sliding portion of the palette.

If you want to use QP the old way, just turn it on from the status bar. Then the QP palette will show up when you select an object, and close when you clear your selection.

But either way, double-clicking still brings up Quick Properties instead of Properties. To change this, head for the CUI and the “Double Click Actions” section.

I’ve expanded two items here to show you a couple of the options.

Notice that when you double-click an arc, you get Quick Properties.

But when you double-click a block, you get “Block – Double Click” (which happens to be BEDIT).

To change an object’s double-click action, just find a new command in the command list (just below the portion of the CUI shown here) and drag-and-drop it onto the object name. An object can only have one double-click action at a time, so dragging-and-dropping automatically replaces the old command with the new one.

You can use this method to replace all the Quick Properties with Properties if you want, or with other relevant commands. (You could set it up so double-clicking on an arc launches the Rectangle command, for example, but I wouldn’t recommend it.)

Some object types have pre-defined non-QP double-click actions. These include:

• Attributes
• Blocks
• Dimensions
• Images
• Polylines
• Splines
• Text
• Xrefs

Others that you might expect to have non-QP double-click actions actually don’t, because they have a contextual ribbon tab that’s activated by a single click or selection instead. The two that I’ve found in this category are:

• Arrays
• Tables

I hope you like the new behavior, but if you don’t, at least you know now how to set it back.