LT Unlimited

Automatically Add Annotation Scales

When you’re working with a drawing containing annotative objects, sometimes you want those objects to automatically pick up on scale changes (to display them in multiple views)—and sometimes you don’t. Fortunately, there’s a variable for that, and it’s right on the status bar.

I confess, when I started this post I thought this little icon had two options: on and off. But it turns out to be a little more nuanced than that.

The variable that this icon controls is ANNOAUTOSCALE, and it has 5 possible values.

• 0: Changing the active scale does not affect existing objects.
• 1: Changing the active scale adds the new scale to existing objects unless they are on a layer that is locked, off, frozen, or frozen in the current viewport.
• 2: Changing the active scale adds the new scale to existing objects unless they are on a layer that is off, frozen, or frozen in the current viewport.
• 3: Changing the active scale adds the new scale to existing objects unless they are on a layer that is locked.
• 4: Changing the active scale adds the new scale to all existing objects.

Whatever value you choose is stored in the registry, and is toggled on and off by the status bar icon. (Factoid: Using the icon actually sets the value negative, so 4 becomes –4 until you turn it back on again. You don’t have to set the variable to 0 to temporarily turn scale adding off.)

Hopefully this will help if you’ve every found yourself wondering why scales were mysteriously added to annotative objects—or why they mysteriously weren’t!

What day is it again?

Here in the States, we had the day off yesterday for the July 4th holiday. While it was great to have a break from email, it also means I’m sitting at my desk thinking, “What day is it today? It feels like Monday, but I’m pretty sure that’s not right…”

Fortunately, AutoCAD LT has a way to help me stay on track: fields.

The Insert Field dialog has an entire category devoted to “Date & Time” fields, with more formats than you will probably ever use.

But if you don’t see the format you want, you can make your own with the code letters as listed on the right.

Here’s a rundown of the four different Date & Time field types:

• CreateDate. This is the date the file was first saved or created. It doesn’t change after you insert it.
• Date. This is simply the date that you insert this particular field. You can update it manually with UPDATEFIELD, but otherwise it doesn’t change.
• PlotDate. This is the date the drawing was last plotted. It will update on successful plots (and as controlled by FIELDEVAL).
• SaveDate. This is the date the drawing was last saved. It will update on successful plots (and as controlled by FIELDEVAL).

Occasionally you might get some quirks—creating a drawing file by copying another will update CreateDate, but not SaveDate.

So, thanks to AutoCAD LT and fields, I know that today is:

Annotation Monitor

I’ve got a handy new feature in AutoCAD LT 2013 to tell you about today—one of those little-but-amazingly-convenient types.

The more observant among you may have noticed it already: a new icon on the status bar.

This is the new Annotation Monitor, and it checks your drawings for dimensions and leaders that have lost their associativity.

(Just to refresh, associative dimensions and leaders stay attached to their geometry when it moves or changes.)

When you turn it on, what may have looked like a nice, well-drafted floor plan…

…suddenly gets these little badges everywhere!

Each yellow flag indicates a non-associative annotation. There’s also an indicator in the bottom right corner of the status bar.

(Red = presence of dissociated annotations.)

This wouldn’t be much of a feature, though, if it didn’t help you fix the errors it finds. So, clicking on one of the exclamation points brings up a menu with two choices, Reassociate and Delete.

Choose Reassociate, and you’re able to pick new points to attach the dimension endpoints to. (If you’re familiar with DIMREASSOCIATE…it’s the same thing.)

A simple blue X indicates a dissociated point, where you’ll want to pick a new one. An X in a box indicates a point that’s already associated. You can pick a new point, but you don’t have to.

 

Once you get all the dimensions fixed, the status bar icon will turn gray:

You can turn Annotation Monitor on or off from the status bar at any time. Although if it were me, I’d leave it on so I could find those pesky non-associative dimensions and FIX them! Because there’s not much worse than unintelligent dimensions, right? (Okay, I can think of a few worse things. But you have to admit they’re pretty annoying!)

Text editor settings

You know, every time I think I’ve seen in all in AutoCAD LT, I’m proven wrong. (That’s not to say that I know it all…just that I’d like to think that anymore I’m rarely surprised by the existence of a feature.)

So what punctured my illusion this time? An overlooked right-click option in the Multiline Text Editor: Editor Settings.

I admit, I’ve never poked around in here before, but there are some pretty useful options in that list! You can also find most of them in the contextual ribbon tab, but they’re scattered in a few different places.

You can turn the ruler on and off, display a floating formatting toolbar next to the editor, even change the color of highlighted text.

So, now that you know about these settings, which ones will you change?

(And if you’re wondering where I found this little gem of knowledge…where else but the Autodesk forums.)

Annotation Visibility

When you’re working in a drawing that uses annotation scaling, sometimes it can be helpful to see only the annotations that exist at the current scale. But sometimes you want to see the others, too.

That’s where Annotation Visibility comes in. It’s just a little toggle on the status bar that lets you see either all annotative objects, even if they’re not defined for the current scale, or just the ones that apply to the current scale.

In the drawing below, you can see that the right-most dimension is only defined at 20:1, not 40:1. (This screenshot was taken in a layout.)

In model space, with Annotation Visiblity is on (also known as ANNOALLVISIBLE = 1) and the scale set to 1:40, here’s what it looks like:

With Annotation visibility turned off, the 20:1-only dimension disappears.

Just as an FYI, this is what the icon looks like when AV is on (you can see all the objects):

And this is what it looks like off:

I know, it’s a little hard to tell the difference at a glance. But if you’re seeing or not seeing something you expect to see, try switching its value and see if you get what you need.

This setting can be toggled from either model or paper space, but it’s really only relevant in model space, since layouts don’t typically have a scale.

Mask Multiline Text

After last week’s post on background masks for dimension objects, I poked around through my archives and realized I’ve never posted on regular text masks. I know I put it in a demo video, but I guess it never got its own post. Let’s fix that.

When you’re creating or editing multiline text, there’s a button the Formatting panel called Background Mask.

Click on it, and you’ll get a dialog box where you can set the offset factor and the fill color.

The offset factor, how far the mask extends beyond the text, is relative to the text height. A factor of 1 keeps the mask the same size as the text. A factor of 1.5 provides a border equal to half the text height all the way around. The maximum factor for the mask is 5.0.

For the fill color, you can either pick a standard color, or use the background color of the drawing, which basically means it’ll plot clear.

New in 2012, the values you choose when creating a mask for a *new* text object will be remembered for the next time you want to apply a mask. (Previously, they defaulted to 1.5 and red every time.)

The reason this only works for new text objects is that background masks are a property of the text. See?

 

So you have to actively set the variables for a new object before they’ll persist.

 

Mask Dimension Text

Ever have a dimension that’s blocking something in your drawing? It’s probably not something important, or you’d move the dimension, but what if you’re putting a dimension on an image, or over some contour lines where it’s hard to read?

To make your text stand out more clearly, you can enable a background mask or fill color in the dimension style. This setting is on the Text tab, and you can either specify an actual color or just use the background of your drawing.

Here’s what the dimension looks like after setting Fill Color to Background:

This setting is also controlled with the DIMTFILL and DIMTFILLCLR system variables. Setting them at the command line will apply an override to your current dimension style, so that new dimensions get the settings but existing dimensions remain unchanged. To update all dimensions, you can right-click on the “style overrides” in the Dimension Style list and choose “save to current style”.

You can also override the fill value for individual dimensions through the Text section of the Properties Palette.

Override Dimension Scale Factor

Normally, I'm a strong advocate for always drawing objects at full size (1:1) and for never overriding the default dimension text. However, there may be times when one or both of those objectives aren't feasible. Or you just may have a misbehaving dimension, and this post might help you set it straight.

The key (or the culprit, depending on your point of view) is the DIMLFAC system variable, also available on the Primary Units tab of the Dimension Style Manager.

By default, this is set to 1, and in most situations should probably stay that way. If you set DIMLFAC to a smaller number, say 0.5, a dimension for a 1" line will display 1/2". If DIMLFAC is bigger than 1, say 2, a dimension for a 1" line will display 2".

Again, I'm expecting that this will help you more for troubleshooting than for practical applications, but it's here if you need it.

Dimension Across Viewports

For those of you who dimension & annotate in paper space, you might sometimes run into the scenario where the object you need to dimension crosses multiple viewports.

As an example, I’ve got a simple bar here, 1'”x20”. I’m showing one end in each of two viewports to condense the display.

When I try to add dimensions, snapping to the corners of the bar, the short end works great but the long dimension displays the paper space distance instead of the actual length.

How to fix this? I actually got the tip from somebody who attended Wednesday’s See the Suite Advantage virtual event. (Recordings are now available on-demand.)

The suggestion is to replace the default dimension text with a field referencing the length of the object instead. Now, normally I don’t advocate overriding dimension text, but when you’re replacing it with intelligent text, I’ll make an exception.

Here’s how it works:

1. Double-click the dimension text to edit it, right-click, and select Insert Field.

2. In the Field dialog, set the Category to Objects and select Object under “Field names.”

3. Next to “Object type” in the dialog, click the “Select Object” button.

4. Here’s where it gets a little sneaky—and I can’t show it in a screenshot. You’ll just have to trust me (or better yet, try it yourself).

Click on the object you want to dimension, even though its viewport isn’t active. I know, it’s weird. But it works, just like it does when you’re selecting objects to dimension from paper space.

5. Back in the Field dialog, pick the property you want to reference (probably Length) and set the format and precision.

6. Click OK, and that’s it! You’re back in the drawing with an intelligent dimension that still knows what it’s attached to.

Admittedly this takes a little more effort than regular old associative dimensions, but once you’re used to placing fields, I think you’ll find it goes pretty quickly.

Add your own words to the AutoCAD LT dictionary

You’re probably aware that AutoCAD LT has a built-in spell checker, accessible from the Annotate tab of the ribbon, with the SPELL command, or as you go with a dashed red line under misspelled words as seen below:

But wait a minute – that word isn’t misspelled! It’s a standard abbreviation. So what to do with it?

As always, you have more than one option. You could just ignore it. The red line only shows up in the editor, and it won’t print, so you could just leave it alone. Or you could right-click on the word and choose “Ignore all”. This turns off the red line temporarily, but it will be back. To get rid of it completely, choose “Add to dictionary” from the right-click menu.

(Anybody else entertained by the fact that “TYPO” is one of the suggested alternatives?)

This is great for adding words one at a time, but there’s also another way to manage your custom dictionary.

Start the SPELL command (from the command line or ribbon) and go to Dictionaries.

(Notice also that you have a choice of main dictionaries, in case you’re spell-checking drawings in different languages. They won’t help you with the actual translations, though.)

In this dialog, you can switch out custom dictionaries (maybe point to one you’ve got on your server), add or delete words from the list (nice of us to put “AutoCAD” in there, don’t you think?) and import other dictionary files.

By the way, a “dictionary file” is just a regular old text file with a CUS extension that contains the list of words you want to be considered as correctly spelled. Easy as pie to create, especially if you’ve already got a standard abbreviation list.