LT Unlimited

No-longer-Express Tools: Overkill & NCOPY

Two more features formerly part of the Express Tools add-on are now full-blown commands in both AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT 2012. They were actually re-written from the ground up, so they’re fully integrated into the program this year. You’ll find both of them on the expanded portion of the Modify panel on the Home tab.

The first is Nested Copy, or NCOPY. With it, you can copy objects out of an  external reference or block directly into the host file. It basically saves you a few steps over previous processes, where you might use REFEDIT or just open the file to get what you need.

You may also notice that NCOPY has the new Array option, just like the regular Copy command.

The other new tool is Delete Duplicate Objects, popularly known as OVERKILL. This one especially has had its performance improved, so if you’ve used it before in a previous version of AutoCAD you should notice a real difference.

Overkill is a drawing-cleanup tool. It removes redundant copies of objects that are exactly on top of each other, eliminates extra vertices in polylines, and combines overlapping co-linear objects.

You can specify a tolerance, to say how close two objects have to be before they’re considered to be overlapping. You can also choose which properties to consider when determining identical-ness. By default, two objects that are different colors would be considered to be the same (and one of them would be removed), but two otherwise-identical lines that are on two different layers would not be the same (they both would stay).

If you’ve ever gotten a drawing that made you ask, “What did they do, copy and paste this thing in the same place fifteen times? And where on earth did all these extra polyline grips come from?” you’ll be glad to see Overkill in your AutoCAD LT.

Considering an upgrade? Check your hardware

Now that AutoCAD LT 2012 is about to hit the shelves, I hope at least some of you out there are considering an upgrade from your current version. Sometimes (but not always), that means upgrading your hardware too. And as computer-literate as I am, sometimes the intricacies of hardware components leave even me stumped.

Take graphics cards. Which one to pick? What capacity should it have? And what difference does it make, anyway? These days, quite a lot.

AutoCAD LT 2012 supports hardware acceleration, which means that it’s better at taking full advantage of your graphics card. (If you had problems with a jumpy cursor before, that’s fixed now.)

To help you decide which card to put in your computer, Autodesk has revised the Certified Hardware page to make it easier to find the tested & recommended cards. No, AutoCAD LT isn’t on the product list (yet), but a card that’s good for AutoCAD is good for AutoCAD too. I think the design is pretty straightforward, but if you want more details you can read Randy Young’s guest post on Without a Net.

Stay tuned for more posts on all the other new features in AutoCAD LT 2012!

Repair Damaged Drawing Files

I’ve posted about the audit and recover commands before, but I thought I’d use today’s post for a quick rundown of the commands and system variables associated with the process.

• AUDIT. Finds and fixes errors in the current drawing.
• RECOVER. Audits and opens the selected file(s).
• RECOVERALL. Like RECOVER, but includes xrefs.
• RECOVERAUTO. Controls whether you’re warned that the drawing you’re trying to be opened needs recovery, and whether AutoCAD LT automatically tries to recover it.
• RECOVERYMODE. Controls whether the information needed to recover a drawing is saved, and whether the Drawing Recovery Manager is opened when needed.
• DRAWINGRECOVERY. Opens the Drawing Recovery Manager.
• AUDITCTL. Specifies whether report files are created after AUDIT.
• REPORTERROR. Controls whether error reports are sent to Autodesk after crashes.

For the system variables, I’d leave all the default settings alone. They’re set to give you the maximum help (automatic recovers, Drawing Recover Manager, error reports) when a good drawing goes bad.

For the commands, I still hope you never have to use them…but they’re there if you do.

Save Drawings to Older Formats

In an ideal world, everybody on your projects would all be using the same version of AutoCAD LT or related AutoCAD-family products. Then you’d never have to worry about file format compatibility.

In the real world, though, you early-adopters sometimes have to help others out. That can mean saving your drawings back to an older format so their older CAD program can read it.

If you just have to do this once, change the file type in the Save As dialog:

You can choose anything from the current format (2010) all the way back to an R12 DXF. And remember, if somebody asks for a “2005 file” or a “2009 file” just use the next smallest number, okay? (2004 for “2005” and 2007 for “2009”.)

But if this is something you have to do all the time, you can make the change permanent in the Options dialog,

The drop-down contains all the formats you’d see in the Save As dialog, and below that are two more options.

“Maintain visual fidelity” is applicable to drawings using annotative scaling. If the box is checked, and you choose a file format of 2007 or earlier, then a new layer is created in the drawing for each scale, and the objects are separated out and put on those layers. (So you might end up with HATCH-48, HATCH-96, TEXT-48, TEXT-96, etc.) These layers are invisible as long as you keep opening the drawing in AutoCAD LT 2008 or higher. Checking this box does increase the file size, so if you’re worried about that and you don’t save drawings back too often, you might want to turn it off.

“Drawing size compatibility” is more about the size of individual objects in a drawing than the size of the drawing itself. Before AutoCAD LT 2007, objects were limited to an uncompressed size of 256MB. You *might* have a text or table object that would be that big, but it’s more applicable to 3D drawings with lots of meshes and surfaces. Overall drawings have a limit too, but it’s something like 4GB, so you probably won’t run into it either.

The short version is that if you’re regularly saving drawings back, you will probably want to leave these boxes checked, but if you’re always saving in the current format, unchecking them probably won’t hurt.

Measure distance between multiple points

You might remember a while ago I told you about a new way to measure geometry in AutoCAD LT 2010 and 2011. MEASUREGEOM is a handy little feature, because it combines a lot of different measurement types and has a nice heads-up display for visual results.

But it turns out that the good old DIST command also includes one of the MEASUREGEOM functions – the ability to measure the distance between multiple points.

(Note: Don’t get DIST confused with DISTANCE. The first is a command; the second is a read-only system variable that stores the last value of the DIST command. Of course, the command alias DI works too.)

After you start DIST, pick your first point, then check out the command line.

Notice there’s an option to enter M, for Multiple. Once you do, you get a bunch more options, including Arcs.

As you continue to select points, whether along lines or around arcs, the running total is displayed on the command line.

Pretty neat, isn’t it?

I’m not sure when this was introduced (I don’t have access to all my old versions today), but it’s at least good through 2010. If someone wants to check an earlier version and let me know the result, I’ll update the post.

Update: Apparently this doesn't work in 2008. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that it doesn't work in 2009 either, that it was put in with the updated Measure Geometry tool in 2010. Again, if you have info to the contrary, just let me know!

The Abilene Paradox

At the training I went to last week, one of the things we talked about was a phenomenon known as the Abilene Paradox. It can be applied to so many situations that I was kind of surprised I hadn’t heard about it before.

It was coined by management expert Jerry B. Harvey, and the general idea is that a group of people can end up going along with a decision that nobody likes – because each person thinks that they’re the only one with a problem. (You can read a good summary on Wikipedia, or watch the video trailer on YouTube.)

Another way of putting it is that problems can stem not from conflict but from agreement. If everybody bites their tongue – suppresses conflict – in the interest of promoting group harmony, sometimes you end up in a place where nobody wants to be.

The basic lesson is that instead of saying “Sure, that sounds like a great idea!” when you’re really thinking “That’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard!” take a minute to think about your reasoning and then don’t be afraid to speak up. Chances are somebody else agrees with you.

It also applies to asking questions in a class or meeting. You might be afraid to, for fear of looking stupid. But I bet if you just ask, at least one other person – if not the whole room – will say “Yeah, I was wondering about that too.” (Even if they don’t say it, I guarantee somebody is thinking it.)

I can think of a few times when I’ve been to Abilene, or when I’ve watched other people go to Abilene – how about you?

Drawing Recovery Manager

I mentioned the Drawing Recovery Manager in a recent post, but only in passing. Today seemed like a good time to come back to it, because I needed it yesterday!

I was in Orlando to help out at an event by Imaginit, where Lynn Allen gave her popular "60 AutoCAD Tips in 60 Minutes" presentation. Although the agenda was pretty full, we managed to find 20 minutes that I could use to give a super-short demo of the new features in AutoCAD 2010.

I was halfway through my first topic, freeform modeling, when AutoCAD crashed. :-( Actually, what happened is that the program froze -- I had to use Task Manager to kill it and restart AutoCAD. (In my several weeks of beta testing, this is the first time this has happened, honest!)

But it turned into a great opportunity to show off the Drawing Recovery Manager. As soon as AutoCAD restarted, the DRM was right there with all the files I had open at the time of the crash. No searching, no worries, and I was right back up and running. Whew!

The Drawing Recovery Manager will show you the following file types (if available), listed from newest to oldest:

• DrawingFileName_recover.dwg
• DrawingFileName_a_b_nnnn.sv$
• DrawingFileName.dwg
• DrawingFileName.bak

You can choose to open any of these and re-save them to continute working. When you have your file back, you can right-click on the drawing in the list and select Remove.

One catch: if you haven't saved your drawing at all, it won't be included in the Drawing Recovery Manager. You have to have saved it at least once to recover it.

Even though you have this great safety net, there's still no excuse for not saving your drawings. So save early, save often, and remember the Drawing Recovery Manager!

Calculate Area Enclosed by Objects or Points

AutoCAD LT includes a number of "inquiry" tools to help you pull information out of a drawing. One of these is the AREA command, located on the Inquiry panel of the Tools tab, or under Tools-->Inquiry-->Area.

When you start the command, you're prompted for corner points. Just keep clicking in the drawing until you've defined your polygon, then press Enter to see the area and perimeter in the current units.

If the object whose area you want is already drawn, you can use the Object option instead (very helpful when the object has a lot of corners).

And if you'd like to see the sum of multiple areas, you can use the Add option. Keep in mind that you have to know in advance that you'd like to add areas -- if you pick a point or object first, the command will end with the results of that object. There's also a Subtract option, which you can use either if you make a mistake adding objects, or if you'd like to see the net area defined by smaller objects within a larger one.

Quick Select

Quick Select is one of my favorite tools, but from what I've seen, it's among the most under-used commands out there. In my opinion, it's the fastest way to populate a selection set of objects that share specific properties.

I've often used Quick Select as a method of checking drawing standards. It's happened that (more than once) I've been happily annotating a drawing, when I look up to discover that I had the wrong layer set current. Oops. The fix is simple, though, with Quick Select.

First, it helps to verbalize what you want to find. "I want to find all dimensions that are not on the DIMENSION layer." Then start Quick Select, choose "dimensions" as the object type, "layer" for the property, "not equal" as operator, and "DIMENSION" as the layer. See how each of those pieces came straight out of the sentence above? They're in a slightly different order, but all the information is there.

Click OK, and you're left with a selection set consisting of nothing but dimensions on all layers other than DIMENSION. Now all there is to do is put them on the right layer, and you're done.

That's just one example of how Quick Select works. The possibilities really are endless. You could select all polylines with an area less than 100 sq. ft., or lines with a length greater than 10, or blocks named LIGHT, or anything. You can even run Quick Select multiple times to add property filters. For instance, all circles with a diameter less than 5 whose color does not equal ByLayer. See?

Play around with Quick Select, and soon you'll wonder what you did without it!

Rename named objects

You can change the name of “named objects” (such as layers, blocks, linetypes, etc.) with the RENAME command. It brings up a dialog listing the object category on the left, the specific object types on the right, and two fields at the bottom for the old and new name.

After you select an instance to rename (wildcards such as * work to select multiple instances) and have entered in the new name, you have two options. Clicking “rename to” applies the change to the selected objects and leaves the dialog box open for more selections. Clicking “OK” applies the change and exits the command. (I’m not sure why they didn’t just have an “apply” button like most other dialogs of this nature.)

This tool should be used with care, since most of the objects here are usually defined in accordance with company standards & shouldn’t be modified, but it’s nevertheless a useful command to know.