LT Unlimited

Custom Right-Click Shortcut Menus

Every chance I get these days, I find myself talking about the benefit of right-click shortcut menus. (When in doubt, right-click!) Even better, most people these days agree with me – almost nobody has them turned off anymore.

But even if you’re already a convert, you can add power to your right-click menus with a little customization.

Let’s take a look at the menu that appears when you’ve got a generic object selected – line, arc, circle, etc.

   

In the middle, there’s a section with a bunch of editing commands: Erase, Mirro, Copy, Scale, Rotate, and Draw Order. But if you compare it to the Modify panel of the ribbon, there’s a big omission: Mirror.

Let’s fix that.

Shortcut menus are stored where most other UI elements are, in the CUI.

There are a ton of them in here, and it’s not always obvious which one you want.

(These are just the defaults, too – you can always make more.)

In this case, since we want to add Mirror to the existing command group, we can just expand the menus until we find the one we need.

It happens to be the Edit Menu.

To add Mirror to this group, it’s as easy as searching for it in the Command pane and dragging-and-dropping it into place.

When you’re done, and press OK to save your changes and exit the CUI editor, you can see that Mirror has now taken its place in the right-click shortcut menu.

P.S. Don’t forget to take the Object Enablers Survey. It’s super-short, and every response counts!

Selection Cycling

Another new feature in AutoCAD LT 2011 is Selection Cycling.

You’ve always been able to cycle through overlapping objects before actually selecting them. A long time ago (pre-2007), this involved the Ctrl key; more recently, you can hold down the Shift key and press the space bar until the object you want is highlighted.

In a really crowded drawing, though, that cycling method could take a while. Enter the new way.

You can turn Selection Cycling on from its icon on the status bar.

After you do, whenever you move your cursor over a busy part of your drawing, an icon appears next to the crosshairs indicating the presence of nearby or overlapping objects.

Left-click while that indicator is showing, and you’ll see a list of all the eligible objects. As you move your cursor over each item in the list, the associated object is highlighted.

To select an object, simply click on it from the list.

Select Similar Objects

Before AutoCAD LT 2011, if you wanted to select, say, all the red circles in your drawing or all the lines on the WALL layer, you’d use the Quick Select command. It’s a really powerful and flexible feature that can save a lot of time when selecting objects for editing.

But now, there’s an even easier way to select objects with similar properties.

Select Similar is available from the right-click shortcut menu when you have one or more objects selected. It automatically grabs all the objects in the drawing that are similar to the one(s) you had selected.

But wait—how does it decide what objects are “similar”? To set your selection criteria, enter SELECTSIMILAR at the command line, and then SE for Settings.

By default, “Layer” and “Name” are checked. “Layer” is obvious, but “Name” only applies to named objects like blocks, images, and xrefs. Object type (circle, line, block, etc.) is always a selection criterion.

With the default settings, two lines on the same layer but with different colors would both be selected by Select Similar. Same for two circles on the same layer but with different linetypes.

You can check or uncheck as many boxes as you like to define your selection set narrowly or broadly.

If you select more than one object to use with Select Similar, the selection criteria are applied to each object individually. So if you select a circle and a line on the same layer, Select Similar will find all the circles and all the lines on that layer. If you select two lines on different layers, Select Similar will find all the lines on both layers. If you select a circle on one layer and a line on another, Select Similar will find all the circles on the same layer as the circle and all the lines on the same layer as the line.

Hatch Improvements in AutoCAD LT 2011, Part 2

In the last post, I toured the changes & improvements for creating hatches in AutoCAD LT 2011. Today, editing! (Because when was the last time you created something in AutoCAD LT and didn't change it later? Never? Yeah, me too.)

First, you don’t need to double-click on a hatch any more in order to edit its properties. Simply select it, and the Hatch Editor contextual tab appears.

(Click the above image to see it full-sized.)

This tab has all the options for adjusting the properties of the hatch. It has a lot in common with the Hatch Creation tab, as you’d expect. Notice that the “remove” and “recreate” boundary options are active now (they’re grayed out on the Creation tab.)

The hatch itself has a new center grip—another instance of improved direct manipulation of objects.

This grip, like the polyline grips, is multifunctional. You can see what options are available by hovering the crosshairs over the grip.

You can click on an item in the list to activate that option, or left-click directly on the grip and use the Ctrl key to cycle through the different behaviors.

The boundary grips for non-associative hatches are still there too, and can be used to modify the shape of the hatch’s perimeter.

When you mirror a hatch object in AutoCAD LT 2011, its angle is now maintained.

New way:

Old way:

I like the new way better, personally, but if you don’t, you can use the new MIRRHATCH variable to change it back.

Finally, we’ve fulfilled one more item from the AUGI wishlist by adding a new option to the Draw Order flyout. Can you spot it?

“Send Hatches to Back,” like “Bring Text/Dimensions to Front,” is straight from the list of feature wishes from users like you. It’s on the ribbon, as you see above, and also accessible as the stand-alone HATCHTOBACK command.

One more reason to leave Dynamic Input on

Last week, I put up a post about why you shouldn’t be in a hurry to turn dynamic input off if coordinate entry isn’t working the way you expect it to.

I left one part out, though – relative vs. absolute coordinates.

By default, dynamic input uses the “relative” method of coordinate input. It assumes that you’re entering deltas instead of actual coordinates. If you start a rectangle at 6,3 and want it to be 8 units wide and 4 high, you’d enter 8,4.

But sometimes, you want to use absolute coordinates instead. Then the second point of that rectangle above would be 14,7.

If this is a once-in-a-while situation, just preface your coordinate entry with the # sign to temporarily use absolute coordinates.

But if it’s your primary workflow, DON’T just turn off dynamic input! Instead, read this post to see how you can change the input settings to whatever fits you best.

Remember, this is AutoCAD LT…there’s almost always a way to make it work the way you work.

Don’t touch that button!

My apologies for the melodramatic post title, but there’s a Dynamic Input issue in the discussion groups that I’d like to see go away. Whenever someone complains that numeric entry isn’t behaving the way they expect it to, the first suggestion is always “Turn Dynamic Input off.” But this is AutoCAD! There’s almost always a way to get it to adapt to your workflow! You don’t have to turn features off! At least, not before you understand all your options, so you’re at least making an informed decision.

I’ve covered all the settings of Dynamic Input in two previous posts (Part 1 and Part 2), but the setting that probably generates the most questions is DYNMODE, or Pointer and Dimension Input.

When Pointer Input is turned on (DYNMODE = 1), you get a mini command line next to the cursor, where you see what you type, whether there’s a command active or a grip selected or not.

If Dimension Input is turned on (DYNMODE = 2), you don’t get the preview next to the cursor anymore. Instead, you get dimensions next to a selected object (showing length, angle, change in length or angle, etc.) where you can enter new values to change the size of the object. You can also press TAB to cycle through the available dimension fields. In the first image below, the active field is “change in length,” and the second is “total length.”

You can also turn them both on, by checking both boxes in the Dynamic Input settings dialog, or by setting DYNMODE to 3. In that case, you get dimension input when it’s available and pointer input when it’s not.

Dimension input is usually the source of the complaints, mainly because you can’t use it to enter the change in value of a block parameter, only the total value. If that bothers you, though, just turn the dimension part of the input off – don’t scrap pointer input until you’re really sure you don’t want it. Personally, there have been times when I’ve turned dimension input off, but I’d hate to have to draft without the heads-up display of the pointer input.

Improved Polyline Editing in AutoCAD LT 2011

Until now, the best way to add a vertex to a polyline involved starting PEDIT and entering “next,” “next,” “next,” “next,” until you found the preceding vertex (oh, there it is), “insert,” *click* “exit” “exit”. Removing a vertex? Even more tedious. And if you wanted to replace one line segment with an arc? I’m not even sure it’s possible with PEDIT.

Fortunately, those days are long gone, thanks to new multi-functional polyline grips.

Want to add a vertex? No problem. Just hover over a grip until you see the menu, then select “Add Vertex.”

Change your mind? Just “Remove Vertex:”

And if you want to convert a line to an arc, there’s an option for that too.

For all of these grips, you can either hover over them and choose an option from their shortcut menu  (as shown in the images above), or you can click directly on the grip and press CTRL to cycle through the different options. Icons next to the cursor will indicate the active behavior.

Multiple Rotate and Copy

A question came in yesterday through the AutoCAD LT feedback e-mail, asking about multiple radial copies -- like multiple copy, but with rotation. It got me thinking about how many ways there were to accomplish this.

1. There's the Copy option in the Rotate command, but that's only good for single copies.
2. There's the Polar option in the Array command, but that's only good for equal angle intervals.
3. There's the Rotate option when grip-editing.

I think that last one deserves a little more attention.

When you select an object and left-click on a grip,  you enter the Stretch mode. Press Enter or the space bar once, and now you're in Move. One more time, and now it's Rotate. (After that it's Scale, then Mirror, then back to Stretch...but we're stopping at Rotate today.)

Within the Rotate mode, there are several options at the command line: Base point, Copy, Undo, Reference, and eXit.

Enter C for copy, and every time you enter an angle or left-click, a new copy is created. The advantage that this has over Array is that you can enter different angles or intervals every time; you're not limited to a single value.

The Base point option means that you're not limited to the grip position as your center of rotation. Enter B at the command line, and you can select a new point in the drawing to serve as the center point. You can even continue to specify new base points as many times as you like, without ever exiting the command.

How's that for several ways to answer a simple question?

(This question is also a perfect reminder of how important terminology and semantics are in AutoCAD LT...how many of you instantly thought of "array" when you read "multiple radial copies"? I didn't...option #2 was actually the last option I thought of.)

Defining Combinations of Object Snaps

In addition to a checkbox in the Drafting Settings dialog, an icon on the status bar, and a 3-letter keyboard shortcut, each Object Snap has its own unique numeric identifier.

• 0 - NONe
• 1 - ENDpoint
• 2 - MIDpoint
• 4 - CENter
• 8 - NODe
• 16 - QUAdrant
• 32 - INTersection
• 64 - INSertion
• 128 - PERpendicular
• 256 - TANgent
• 512 - NEArest
• 1024 - Clears all object snaps
• 2048 - APParent Intersection
• 4096 - EXTension
• 8192 - PARallel
• 16383 - All object snaps

When you turn on a running object snap, it gets added to the value of the OSMODE system variable. For example, if you had only Endpoints and Centers turned on, OSMODE would be 5. The way that the values are defined means that every possible combination yields a unique sum.

According to Help, the default is 4133, which corresponds to End, Center, Intersection, and Extension. Once you get your own preferred snaps, you can check the value of OSMODE and save it for future reference. You could just remember it, or you could assign different values to buttons on the ribbon to activate different combinations for different tasks.

My favorite OSMODE is 4223 -- what's yours?

Scale Objects in One Direction Only

Usually when you scale something, you want to apply the same scale factor to all your objects in all directions. For instance, two rectangles that were 4x6 and 5x7 might become 8x12 and 10x14 after scaling.

But what if you wanted the rectangles to become 4x12 and 5x14 -- so they were scaled in only one direction? Okay, you could use the stretch command, but you'd have to do it twice, since the change in the rectangles isn't the same.

Instead, you can make a temporary block consisting of the objects you want to scale, and change its properties so that it has non-uniform scales in the X and Y directions. Then, when you explode the block, you get your original objects back, but scaled in one direction only (or by different factors for each direction).

As usual, there are a couple things to keep in mind. You have to watch out for polylines with arc segments. Non-uniformly scaled arcs become elliptical arcs, and polylines don't support those. So when you explode your temporary block, any polylines with arcs will be exploded into their component lines and (elliptical) arcs.

Also, for the last few releases, you have been able to specify that blocks can only be scaled uniformly -- obviously you need to turn that off to use this tip. You can either do that when you create the block, or from the Properties palette inside the Block Editor with no objects selected.