Drawing without construction lines

Sometimes you probably draw construction lines in order to provide reference points for the insertion or creation of other entities.  A long time ago, a wise man told me “you never need to draw construction lines”, and then he shared his ancient knowledge with me.  This is before OTRACK was available, even before Windows was [...]

Read Full Post »

Background Masks in Block Attributes

I’ve previously discussed how to use background masks with annotative text. Now I want to talk about using background masks in block attributes. Using the ATTDEF command, you create an attribute, but once it is created, there doesn’t appear to be any way to apply a background mask. The trick is to [...]

Read Full Post »

AutoCAD Blog Roundup

I’m back!  Our big project went out and I’m back from vacation, so I’ve finally got some free time to devote to the ol’ blog. Here’s a nice collection of AutoCAD tips:

The CommTech CAD Cafe has a good article on controlling the UCS icon and layout tabs.
Lynn Allen introduces us to XLIST. [...]

Read Full Post »

Turn off Error Reporting

So AutoCAD crashes every once in a while. It’s bound to happen. If it happens a lot, you might get tired of the error reporting dialog box popping up (unless you enjoy filling in the error report with a series of expletives - I wonder how many reports are received with this [...]

Read Full Post »

Automatically Purge Scale List

Tired of seeing all of those xref’d scales showing up in your scale list? Never use ‘em? Here’s a little AutoLisp routine you can use to automatically purge the list upon opening a drawing.

Read Full Post »