LT Unlimited

Viewport Macros

Looking for some time-saving shortcuts for your everyday work? CAD Notes has a post today from Paul Munford of the CAD Setter Out with 11 macros for working with viewports.

Read the article

Paul suggests putting the macros on a tool palette, as seen on the right, but of course you can put a macro on all kinds of interface elements, including ribbon panels, toolbars, and pull-down menus.

Got your own click-saving macros you’d like to share? Send ‘em on in, and I’ll feature them here too.

Maximize Viewport

You probably know that you can double-click inside a viewport’s boundary to activate and edit the items in model space.

But have you ever double-clicked on a viewport boundary?

If you try it, you’ll see that your screen suddenly looks a lot like model space, except with a diagonal red border all the way around the outside.

What you’ve done is maximized your viewport—you can edit, pan, zoom, etc., and when you’re done you can go back to paper space without having affected the scale or view area of the viewport.

Which brings us to the next logical question: How do you get back?

Look for the red-bordered button on the status bar.

Click it, and it minimizes your viewport, taking you back into the layout. The arrows on either side let you maximize different viewports. The view might not change unless you’ve got viewport overrides like layer color or visibility settings.

For my keyboard fans, the commands for this feature are VPMAX and VPMIN.

Maximum Active Viewports

Ever make a new viewport and realize that another one has suddenly gone blank? And when you try to turn it back on, a different one goes blank?

Meet MAXACTVP.

This system variable, stored in each drawing, controls the number of viewports in a layout that can be displayed at one time. These days, the default value is 64, but it used to be 16, and since it’s a per-drawing setting you might still have a bunch in your library with that setting.

So if MAXACTVP is 16, and you create a 17th viewport in the layout, one of them will have to be turned off.

This does not affect plotting, fortunately, but it’s still a little disconcerting to see those blank viewports floating around. Chances are your computer has enough power to show all the viewports you could possibly want to create, so go ahead – set it to 64. Or higher. (But I think it’d have to be a pretty big sheet to get more than 64 viewports on it!)

Twitter Tip of the Day: Go to View

Ever want to switch to a different drawing view without going through the ribbon or dialog box? @LTisACAD has the solution for you:

VIEWGO command is a quick way to switch to your saved VIEW in a drawing file without going through the main dialog pop-up.

This was a new one to me – I love finding new commands! It’s not *quite* undocumented (it has an entry in the Command Reference), but it’s not in the User Guide.

Viewports Zoom Extents When Activated

This is another post inspired by a frequent discussion-group topic. The scenario is that someone double-clicks inside an unlocked viewport and suddenly the view zooms to extents. Probably not what you had in mind.

Like a lot of unexpected behaviors in AutoCAD LT, the fix is easy once you know where to look. In this case, it's the variable UCSFOLLOW. When it's set to 0, as it is by default, nothing happens to your view when you change the UCS -- i.e. when you go from layout coordinates to model space. But if it gets set to 1, a change in UCS automatically regenerates a plan view, and zooms to the extents of the drawing.

The only thing to remember is that each viewport has its own UCSFOLLOW setting. So if you have more than one viewport acting up, you need to set USCFOLLOW to 0 in each viewport. (That means double-click inside it and change the variable. Changing it in just model space or just a layout isn't enough.)

Locking a viewport also prevents this kind of view changes -- depending on your setup, that may be a viable alternative too.

Named Views and Hyperlinks

I really like getting tips from users, but it's not often I get the same tip from two people! Kevin Braun and Murray Clack wrote in within a few days of each other about the benefits of named views and hyperlinks -- two subjects I haven't posted much about. (I didn't think there were too many of those left!)

Kevin says:

Something I don't see a lot of talk about, but I use almost all day long, are Named Views and Hyperlinks.

We use Named Views to help out the people who use our finished drawings. They click on the Named View and they can see what they need.  This is very cool, because it sets layers, UCS, etc.

We use model space markers with names to direct them to the proper Named View.

As usual, I got tired of typing in the names and all the scrolling down the list of views, and said to myself, "Wouldn't it be cool to just click on the marker?" (a bright light bulb turned on in my head!) I went to Hyperlinks and discovered you can link an object to a Named View! This was very cool.

Now I drop the marker in the drawing, and Hyperlink it to a view. Now all we do is click on the marker and away we go, no more scrolling through a drop down window. Getting around is so much faster now.

Murray's tip:

Below is a step-by-step process that helps you quickly navigate between Modelspace orientations and multiple Layout tabs using Saved Views and Hyperlinks.

1. While in a Layout tab, use the VIEW command to save a view name (usually, I would name the view based on whatever the sheet number would be, like “A101”)
2. Then, draw a closed pline around the perimeter of a Viewport (either on Layer “defpoints” or a unique layer set to “no plot”), and then use the CHSPACE command to send the pline into Modelspace through that Viewport.
3. With your cursor still within Modelspace via inside the Viewport, save a new view name to something reflecting what is going on within the viewport and including the sheet number (eg. “Plan 1 – A101”), and then bring your cursor back into the Layout environment (ie. PSPACE command)
4. Enter the command HYPERLINK
5. When prompted to “Select Objects”, select the Viewport boundary that you just saved a view in.
6. When the “Edit Hyperlink” dialog box appears, click on the “View of this Drawing” button
7.  Expand the Model tree by clicking on the “+” symbol, select the view name you just created, and then click the OK button

Now, hold down your Ctrl key, and click once on the Viewport boundary with your left mouse button.  AutoCAD will then switch to Modelspace and zoom into the area of the saved Modelspace view that you created earlier – and you will also see the closed pline that you sent through the Viewport.

To get back to the Layout tab, repeat steps 4 through 7, but this time, select the closed pline and select the saved view for the Layout.

(I just tried Murray's tip, and it's not as complicated as it sounds. Really.)

Two slightly different approaches, but both using the same tools to speed up navigation in drawings.

What do you think? Anybody else out there using named views and hyperlinks?

Trapped in Modelspace

It's happened to all of us: You zoom into a little space on your layout to check something, double-click in the drawing (either accidentally or on purpose), and end up in modelspace. If you're there on purpose, you can make your edits and be done, but if you've double-clicked by accident, you might not realize what's happened until you try to zoom out and realize you can't see your title block.

Oops.

So, how to get back to paper space? You can't zoom out to see the viewport border, selecting the layout tab name won't do it, and you may or may not have paper and model toggles in your status bar (depending on version and status bar settings).

One way is to type PS (alias for PSPACE), but there's another nifty way too.

Instead of heading for the command line, go to the status bar and lock your viewport. Then you can zoom out, unlock the viewport, and reset the scale. (Locking the viewport again when you're done doesn't hurt, to prevent this sort of thing from happening again.)

Just another proof that there's always more than one way to do anything in AutoCAD LT.

Rotate a view along with its viewport

Prior to AutoCAD LT 2010, you couldn't rotate paperspace viewports. (If you tried, it just sort of moved around the screen, maintaining its original orientation.) If you wanted to show a viewport at a different orientation, you had to go through a multi-step process involving the UCS and PLAN commands...big hassle.

Now, though, you can change a view's orientation simply by rotating its viewport.

Here's the original view:

 

And after using the rotate command on the viewport:

 

The view automatically updates to match the new orientation -- no need to mess around with the UCS or anything.

This is the default behavior, but if you don't like it, we've given you the option to turn it off. Setting the system variable VPROTATEASSOC to 0 means that only the viewport boundary rotates, not the view inside it.

Create a Viewport with Holes

Now that AutoCAD LT has the ability to create non-rectangular viewports, I thought I'd share a way to create viewports with "holes", or empty spaces.
 
Let's say you want a triangular viewport with a circular hole in the middle.

The first step is to turn the objects into regions with the Region command, available on the Draw panel of the Home tab. Just start the command, and select the two objects. When you're finished, they don't look any different, but when you select them you'll see that the grips have changed, and if you try to grip-edit the shapes they'll move instead of stretch.

To get the hole in the middle, you'll use the Subtract command, to subtract the circular region from the triangular. This command is a little sneaky, since it's only available at the command line. (Of course, you could always put it on a button if you want.) You'll first pick the object to subtract from (the triangle), and then the object to be subtracted (the circle). Again, at first glance, nothing seems to have changed, but when you hover over the region boundary you'll see that it's now one object instead of two.

Now you're ready to turn the region into a viewport. To do this you'll use the "Create from Object" function from the Viewports panel of the View tab. This enables you to convert an existing object -- a closed polyline, an ellipse, a spline, a region (hint, hint), or a circle -- into a viewport. Just start the command, select the region, and there it is.

The region has become a viewport. You can pan, zoom, and set the scale just like you would with any other viewport. The only catch is that you can't edit the boundaries like you would with a polygonal viewport. To change it, you pretty much have to erase it and start over. (Sorry.) It can still be pretty handy, though!

Copy/Paste a Viewport

Today's post highlights one of those feature improvements that isn't big enough to get a lot of mention in the product documentation, but can still have an impact on your day-to-day productivity.

Prior to LT 2009, when you used Ctrl+C to copy a viewport and Ctrl+V to paste it, the new viewport was turned "off", i.e. it didn't display the objects inside it. You had to use the Properties palette (Misc --> On --> Yes) or the right-click menu (Display viewport objects --> Yes) to turn it back on.

Now, though, when you paste a viewport, it's turned on by default. (Hooray!)

I hope that saves somebody a few seconds in their day -- even a few seconds over hundreds of copy-pastes can add up to a lot of time!