AutoCAD 2011: Polyline Enhancement

Let us discuss more about the AutoCAD 2011 enhancement. We have discussed about the AutoCAD 2011 hatch enhancement, and now we are going to discuss about AutoCAD 2011 polyline enhancement. Like the hatch enhancement, there is nothing you can’t do in AutoCAD 2010. There is nothing different with creating polyline, but you can modify polyline much easier in AutoCAD 2011. If you use many polyline in your work, you may love it.

Polyline in Contextual Menu

When you are selecting a polyline (not multiple polyline), right click your mouse, you can find additional menu in AutoCAD 2011: polyline. There are several polyline modification tools here. I don’t use polyline that much, so honestly it doesn’t quite interest me. But probably you will find it useful.

I’m trying to look for polyline in contextual menu when I selected a line. I’m kind of disappointed that I can’t find it. I often draw several lines and join them later as a single polyline. When PEDIT find that it’s not a polyline, it will offer me to convert it to polyline. Sometimes this method is faster. It looks like we still need to use PEDIT command.

Using Grip Control

If you selected a polyline, you will find additional grips in the polyline segments. This control grip is similar with the one in hatch editor.

You can stretch, add vertex… and this one is new: convert the segment to arc! Just like using hatch control grip, you can cycle between those tool by pressing [ctrl]. If you often use polyline, I believe you will like it very much. I remember how many step we need to go through just to add a vertex. And how we can modify a segment and change it to an arc. You can also pick a polyline vertex and do some vertex editing using the similar way.

See animation below to see how it works.

Editing polyline is easier in AutoCAD 2011, but since I don’t use it that much, I can live without it. How about you, do you like this enhancement?