Boxed in text

This one doesn't come up too often, but when it does it is slightly hard to find. If you need to make a resizing box around your text in AutoCAD, try the TCIRCLE command. Just type in TCIRCLE and select the text you need to "box in", enter your preferences, and wala "boxed in text".

Viewport Layer Changes on Creation In Layout

A user had his Viewport Layer change upon creation of the viewport from modelspace to paperspace. He created it in modelspace on layer AM_VIEWS and when creating the viewport in Layout Space, it would switch to the current layer. The solution was to go into OPTIONS >> AM_STANDARDS and check the state of the checkbox "Apply new settings to layers...". This setting can get out of sync at times.

Commands and dialog boxes incorrect behavior

A user here began having strange behavior issues in his AutoCAD sessions. His explode and purge programs would not open as command line entries (even when he typed in "_PURGE", etc..). His LISP routines would pop up dialog boxes even when the variables were to set to keep them closed. Through a lot of diligence on his part, he found that the variable QAFLAGS might be the culprit. He looked at his setting and it was set to 17. All other users here were set to 16. He set it to 16 and tada, his AutoCAD is back to normal. A great find on his part. I hope this might help others.

Exploding Arc Text in AutoCAD

We needed to explode the arc aligned text in AutoCAD to import it into another program. Exploding the text made it revert to the wrong text and using the Express Tools Explode Text did not work. To get what we needed we first added a text style with the font we desired. We exploded the arc text with "explode" command. We then selected all of the text, changed its style property to the style with the font we wanted, and then used the Express Tools "explode to text" command. This got us very very close to what we needed and worked out well.

Raster inserted without path

Our company has proprietary drawing files that we do not give to our customers for final documentation. Our customers now require that we give them these drawings. They understand that they are proprietary and do not require them to be in AutoCAD but still need to see them and have them with their title blocks in AutoCAD. The method to accomplish this is to insert a raster image of our drawing file into the AutoCAD drawing. To do this and not have the path or the raster image as a separate file, I use a method that was prescribed on the Cadforum.cz site. I open the tif in a raster editor (I use Infanview because it is free and works great), and then select COPY and then in AutoCAD select PASTE SPECIAL. From this I select DEVICE INDEPENDENT BITMAP. It puts it in as a OLE object and the path is blown away. I tried copy and paste from Explorer and also inserting as an OLE object but those methods did not work. One note. Even with this method, an issue arose with the image. After a save, the reopened file had a blank rectangle instead of the image. After many iterations of various settings, I think I have a fix. I analyzed the TIF image we were using to paste in the drawing. Always A2 size images worked but A0 and A1 failed often. Hmmm, I tweaked the image properties of the file (using IrfanView) and then saved it with the image at 50 percent of its original size and repeated my steps. What do you know. It opened back up after a save and the image was visible.

Crosshairs at Isometric/Angles

A setting I always seem to forget is how to rotate the cursor/crosshairs to draw at different angles. A quick refresher: Variable SNAPANG rotates the cursor at the angle you specify. Variable SNAPSTYL toggles between and isometric cursor and rectangular cursor.

... and the View is beautiful

Here are a few free AutoCAD viewers for interested readers.

http://www.opendwg.org/guestfiles

http://www.edrawingsviewer.com/

http://www.infograph.com/products/dwgviewer/

Impeding progress...

What is holding these things up? Well in the publishing world (AutoCAD Publish that is), a user kept getting a "Job Already In Progress" dialog popping up. He is one of the few users here who use Publish since we have an in house solution already for plotting but nonetheless we needed to solve it. A few searches hinted at a solution and it turned out to be that within the OPTIONS >> PLOT AND PUBLISH tab, the Enable Background Processing for PUBLISHING was set to ON. He switched it to OFF (unchecked) and he no longer has impeded progress. It is about time to live in the here and now. May the Lord Bless.

Too much support

Well, Sometimes you just get too much support. How's that? Recently I began getting a pop up dialog that prompted me that the drawing I was opening had Mechanical objects that were saved to a version that made them incompatible. That is good info but I was using vanilla AutoCAD and I had never seen this come up before. It appeared from the command line to run a _amconsistencycheck command. I tried looking it up but to no avail. To make a long story short, I had added a new support path in my Options that pointed to the ACADM folder. Once this path was removed, the command did not come up automatically.

Snappy Tabby

Catchy title (don't you think? .. anyway). Just a quick reminder (one of our users asked the other day), if you use multiple osnap types but it seems AutoCad has this uncanny way of picking the one you do not want first, you can toggle through your osnaps with the TAB key. Like I said, Snappy Tabby.

Hold the presses...

Printing that is. A user's plot dialog in AutoCAD took at least a minute to appear. I thought it could be a page setup issue, but he was set to None, so no issue there. I thought about it, maybe his printers. Took a quick look and what do you know, he had printers that were obsolete and/or unreachable from his computer. We deleted them and poof, the dialog is fast again. I have heard the same issue can appear with old drivers and certain printers (update if necessary). Let the presses roll!

Unknown but not forgotten

What next! Today I was going along as usual and then my "CH" (PROPERTIES) command disappeared. "What in the world.." I get an "Command: _properties Unknown command "PROPERTIES" Not good (I think to myself). I go to Control Panel and do a "Repair Registry" on my AutoCAD install. Nope, no change. I then do a "Repair Install". Nope. Getting a little worried here. I do a reinstallation. Still nothing. Oh no I think to myself. Finally I find the solution. It is the DEMANDLOAD variable. I never think about it, so it never occurred to me. I type it in, it is set to 0, so I change it to 2 and "wahlah", I am known again. It's good not to be forgotten.

Z is for Zorr... Zero

How to be level headed. I do not know how it happens (I have a few guesses), but we get entities with non zero Z components in our drawings quite a bit. These wreak havoc when creating 2D drawings because lines begin to have strange measurements and objects will not edit correctly. It is much harder after the fact to try and correct this but there are some methods. Use of AutoCAD's own FLATTEN command is a good place to start. It works pretty good but we have found it doesn't fix everything usually. Entities inside blocks and objects like splines will not flatten. You will have to edit them individually to flatten them. One thing we have done is that since we use quite a few converted 3D drafting files (from Unigraphics), we flatten them before they come into our assemblies. Flattening them before we start using them to snap to is a big help. We try, I repeat try to, not to use the converted 3D ents to draw to but it is a mixed bag. In Mechanical, the Hide function has issues with entities that are not on the same plane so take note. In the meantime, keep calm and keep a flat, err.. level head.

X-Ray vision

Construction lines only see the positive side of life?

Posted at the Autodesk forum: if your construction lines only extend to right and upward (the positve directions), then you need to toggle construction line creation from ray to xline. Use AMCONSTSWI at the command line to be able to see in all directions. Up, up and away.