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 out.

There are two time-saving features I want to share with you: .x/.y and mee.

mee

Let’s say you have two lines, unconnected, and you want to draw another line between them, starting at the halfway point.  You could draw a line between the midpoints, then draw your line with the MID osnap, but there is a faster way.

Command: line
Specify first point: 'cal
>>>> Expression: mee
>>>> Select one endpoint for MEE:
>>>> Select another endpoint for MEE:

The ‘cal command executes the inline calculator transparently, which gives you access to the mee function.  To use mee (which stands for middle end end), just click on the two endpoints you want to use as the basis for your imaginary construction line.  Be sure to turn off OSNAP (F3), because it has a tendency to mess with mee.

Once you have clicked on the two endpoints, mee returns the midpoint between the two endpoints to the line command, and you can resume drawing your line.

.x/.y

Here’s another feature not everybody knows about: .x and .y (and .z if you’re into that whole “3D” thing.  It’s just a fad if you ask me).

When a command asks for a point, you can type “.x” or “.y” to provide only the x or y coordinate for the point you want.  So let’s say we want to start a line at the x coordinate of one of the endpoints of the bottom right lines, and the y coordinate of one of the endpoints of the upper left lines, as shown here:

Just type in these commands:

Command: line
LINE Specify first point: .x of  <Osnap on> 

(click on one of the bottom right lines to select an endpoint)

(need YZ): 

(click on one of the upper left lines to select an endpoint)

The constructed point is given to the line command, and you can resume drawing your line.  Try it for yourself!

Sometimes we need to export our drawing files from Civil 3D to plain vanilla AutoCAD. This may be necessary for a variety of reasons: the client or another consultant doesn’t have Civil 3D and they aren’t able to install the Civil 3D Object Enabler, or you are producing an archive set and don’t want to risk future versions of AutoCAD being unable to read old Civil 3D data. Also, given that Civil 3D surfaces take longer to load, you might want to produce vanilla AutoCAD versions of your design surfaces and pipe networks for use as base files on your plan set.

I’ve discovered a few issues with exporting from Civil 3D 2008 to vanilla AutoCAD, and have some workarounds.

Problem #1: Contours don’t retain elevation

If you want to export your contours, they will appear as polylines (light-weight polylines, to be precise) in the exported file, all with an elevation of zero. You might need that! There are two fixes for this:

1. Use the “Surfaces > Utilities > Extract Objects from Surface” command. This will create polylines with elevation data in your current drawing, and which will remain in your drawing when you export. You’ll want to hide the contours in the original surface, though, otherwise you’ll export both the extracted polylines and the 0-elevation polylines.
2. Another option is to rotate your view so you are looking at your surface in 3D (shift-middle mouse button). You may have to edit your surface style so that the contours are displayed. Now when you export the contours will export as polylines with elevation data. Open your file up, type “Plan” to return to 2d View, and you’re set.

A few caveats: with method 2, profiles will not properly export. With method 1, you have to Extract Objects from every surface (you can’t just “select all”), so if you have a lot of surfaces, method 2 might be easier.

Problem #2: Object Coloring/Text Hatches

When Civil 3D exports labeled contours or certain pipe labels, it creates a hatch behind the text, and colors that hatch whatever your background color is. If your model space is anything but white, the hatch will show up in your plots, often as a filled black rectangle. So you need an quick way to fix that. Again, there are two possible solutions:

1. Change the hatch to white (255,255,255). You can select everything in your drawing and then select “hatch” from the Properties window drop-down box, then adjust the color from there. If you have other hatches in your drawing, you may want to isolate the layer(s) that the text hatches are on using LAYISO.
2. You can delete all of the hatches (using the FILTER command) and replace them with background masks. Again, you might want to isolate the relevant layers before doing this. Use the Properties window drop-down to select all MText entities. Once you have selected only MText that you want to mask (using Shift-selections to remove those that you don’t), you can click on the ellipses next to Background Mask and set your mask.
   Be sure to set the background color to “use drawing background color”.

   

Another related problem is that a lot of entities will be exported with their entity color set to whatever their layer color was. Or, if the entity was set to a specific color in the style settings, to that color. Generally, I like to set everything to BYLAYER. So, I recommend selecting everything and setting to it to BYLAYER.

Problem #3: Linetypes will not export properly

I’ve only encountered this once, and it took a minute to figure out what was going on. After exporting a pipe network to vanilla AutoCAD, the line on the bottom is the same linetype as the one on the left, but rotated around its axis.

The solution here is to FLATTEN the offending lines. That’s it.

I hope this helps. Happy exporting!

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 use multiline attributes.

Checking “Multiple lines” makes the “Default” value editable only by clicking on the ellipses.

If you click on these and type in your text (you can type just one line if you want), you can then highlight and right-click on your text and select “background mask” and apply the background mask settings.

Check “Use background mask”. I usually set the border offset factor to 1.2 or so, and the fill color to “use drawing background color”.

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. Personally, I like to set up an alias like “LX” to execute the command line version, -XLIST, so the results remain in the command history window.  Great for finding layer names and referring to them in the layer dialog box.
• Ward Romberger from has provided some esoteric but useful information about editing multiple MTEXT entries.  It’s articles like this that make CAD-e-Corner my favorite AutoCAD blog.
• Finally, Donnie Gladfelter has an insightful article about using STB-based plotting over at The CAD Geek.  I’m going to have to consider switching over to STBs.

I’ve got some more tips of my own planned, so stop back soon!

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 invaluable content).

So turn it off. Just type REPORTERROR 0 in the command line.

I recently tried to add a wipeout to a bit of annotative DTEXT, and discovered that these two things don’t play well together in AutoCAD 2008. Basically, the text just disappears. So what do you do if you want to display some masked task at one particular scale? It’s easy.

First, make sure the scale you want to set the annotative text to exists in the drawing. Type ScaleListEdit, or click on the Annotation Scale on the bottom right of your AutoCAD window and select Custom. If the scale you need doesn’t exist, click add to add it. Hit okay on those two dialogs, and set your current scale to the scale you just added.

Now create an annotative text style if you don’t already have one. In the Text Style dialog (DDSTYLE), just make sure the “Annotative” check box is checked, then set your text height to whatever your want it to appear as in Paper Space. I usually use 0.125.

Now create some MTEXT (DTEXT won’t work). After you type your text, right click on the text area and select “Background Mask…” from the dropdown menu.

In the Background Mask dialog, check “Use background mask” and adjust your border offset factor as you see fit. Then check “Use drawing background color”, because you probably don’t want a colored mask - we’re trying to reproduce the wipeout effect.

Now hit okay, and hit okay to get out of the MTEXT editor. Select your text and look at the annotative scale setting in the floating Properties window.

Click on the “..” button to assign the desired scale to the text. After you add your scale, you can delete the default 1:1. You could also have set the “automatically add scales” feature by clicking on the second button to the right of the annotative scale selector.

Note that the background mask applies to the MTEXT box, not the text itself. So you might want to resize the box to fit perfectly around the text.

One of my biggest gripes with PSLTSCALE is that it can make working in model space a pain. I like to see what my linetypes are going to look like when they plot, and with PSLTSCALE set to 1, you need to have LTSCALE set to 1 (generally) rather than the scale of your viewports. Of course, if you have multiple viewports at different scales, you generally need to have both PSLTSCALE and LTSCALE set to 1.

Annotative scales to the rescue.

David Koch published a nice article about a solution to all of our woes. It seems that if you set the system variable MSLTSCALE to 1, you can have beautiful linetype scales in both paperspace and modelspace. According to AutoCAD’s help file, MSLTSCALE “scales linetypes displayed on the model tab by the annotation scale”. The annotation scale, if you didn’t know, is controlled by the little box in the lower right corner of your screen:

With MSLTSCALE set to one, you can change this value to display your linetypes at a scale matching any of your viewports. You just need to set MSLTSCALE to 1, PSLTSCALE to 1, and LTSCALE to 1 (or thereabouts). These are all per-drawing settings (and PSLTSCALE is a per-layout setting).

If you are new to annotation scales, once you do this, you will also want to use the viewport annotation scale control to set each viewport’s annotation (and, therefore, linetype) scale to match the scale of that viewport. Just click on a viewport and these tools appear in the lower right corner of your screen:

Use the lock button to lock or unlock the viewport (also accomplished with the MVIEW Lock command). If the viewport is unlocked, the VP scale selection can be changed here (or you can use zoom, obviously), and the annotation scale can be changed as well, generally to match the viewport scale.

I hope this helps.

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.

Create a text file in C:\Program Files\AutoCAD 2008\Support (or elsewhere in your support path) called scalelistreset.lsp. Paste the following into the file:

(setvar "cmdecho" 0)(terpri)(command "-scalelistedit")(command "reset")(command "yes")(command
"exit")

You can download this file here (right-click and select Save Link As…): scalelistreset.lsp

In order to get this routine to run every time you open a file, open up acaddoc.lsp and add the following line:

(load "scalelistreset")

Create acaddoc.lsp if it doesn’t already exist. Again, the file needs to reside in your support path.
That’s it. Enjoy your pristine scale lists.

Update: Between the Lines has posted an announcement about Autodesk’s new, free Scale List Cleanup Utility.

Ever since AutoCAD 2000, we’ve had the ability to filter our layer manager and layer toolbar views. One thing that I always found myself doing is adding a filter which shows only non-xref layers. It’s easy enough to create one (just use ~*|* as a name filter), but I wanted something faster, so I wrote a VBA script to add the filter.

It’s a simple thing, but it saves me a lot of time. Here’s how you can use this script.

Start by downloading this .dvb file (22 kb). You could load and run it with VBAMAN, but I like to have a toolbar button handy. To create a toolbar button to run this VBA app, type CUI.

In the Command List pane, click the “New Command” button.

Now pick an image for the button, change the name to “Create Non-Xref Layer Filter” or something equally brilliant, and copy the following text into the Macro field (changing <path to file> to whatever folder you keep your macros in):

^C^C_-vbarun "C:/<path to file>/createnonXreffilter.dvb!Module3.Main";

Now drag (or paste) the command from the Command List to whatever Toolbar location you want.

That’s it. Now just click on the toolbar whenever you want to add this filter. (Now if only I could figure out a way to apply it to the layer toolbar without having to go into the Layer Manager).

I like to have this filter in my acad.dwt default drawing template, too.

Donnie Gladfelter has an article on how you can add VB apps or other scripts to a tool pallette.

Erhan Toker has some additional information about layer filters.

I hope this helps!

Looks like I got a little busy (napping) over the holidays, so I’ve let the blog roundup slide.  Well, here are a few highlights:

• Ellen Finkelstein elucidates methods for copying objects between drawings.
• LuAnn Sims leaves a few tips on the little things.
• and Heidi Hewett has some valuable information regarding mouse zooming.