Harold Reuvers shares he loves XLINE and he created a macro to create horizontal and vertical XLINE quickly. Al Popovich shares his favorite object: point.

They remind me about AutoCAD entities/objects I rarely use. I often create elevation views by projecting a floor plan, but I don’t use XLINE! I literally draw lines by clicking a point from referenced object and another point at where I want the line ends.

Let’s see these objects/entities that we can use for creating quick reference or construction.

The 3 objects

XLINE

You can activate XLINE by typing it or accessing from home tab of your ribbon. It’s on draw panel. You have to expand it before you can see this tool.

XLINE will create infinite line that you can use as reference or construction. It’s much better than if you click two points to create a reference line!

You can use it to trim objects too. And if you trim an XLINE, it will convert to a line.

This is very useful for creating elevation/section view from a floor plan. Or other drawing that’s created by referencing from other drawing.

RAY

Ray is similar with XLINE. The difference is, you define two points: start point and direction. I prefer XLINE to help me complete my task. But if you need to create several infinite lines from a point with different angles, this is the right tool for you.

POINT

Point is point. We use it to create point references. In a very crowded drawing, you may find it’s not so easy to snap to end point or intersection. You need to some quite close until you can comfortably snap to a reference. If you place points in locations you are regularly snap to, you can quickly find a point by override your object snap to node.

Bonus tip

Those tools are already very useful as they are. Let’s see some tips so you can use them more efficiently.

Macro to create horizontal/vertical XLINE quickly

We, AutoCAD users always look for faster way to work. At least less key strokes to use AutoCAD tools.

This is the original tip from Harold Reuvers.

Using AutoLISP program

You can create an AutoLISP program using this code to create horizontal XLINE only by one character:

(defun c:H ()

(command "XLINE" "H" pause)

)

Not familiar with AutoLISP? You can try to create your first one by following this tutorial. Use the code above for your program.

Using macro for CUI or tool palettes

If you prefer to use macro, you can use this code, and place it in toolbar or ribbon by modifying CUI. Or you can place it in tool palettes:

^C^C_XLINE;H;

If you want to place it in ribbon/toolbar, learn how you can create new command in CUI. And if you prefer to place it in tool palettes, read how you can do it here.

For vertical XLINE, you can change H to V. Those two types of XLINE are the most used (at least for me). But I prefer to use XZ and XX instead of V and H. They will not replace default AutoCAD alias, and close to each other.

Point style

If you are not familiar with point yet, you may think it’s useless because it’s difficult to see. You can change point style for better visibility.

Type DDPTYPE then enter.

Choose the one that you think most suitable for you.

Hint: Change point style to blank when you plot your drawing. AutoCAD will plot points as displayed on your screen.

Conclusion

There are so many AutoCAD tools. Some of them are overlooked and we never use them. It’s not really necessary to know all the tools, but it would be great if we know the tools before deciding not to use them.

Do you use tools that people rarely use? And have you used these three tools above?

Thank you to Harold Reuvers and Al Popovich for sharing the tips!

What can we do with acaddoc.lsp?

Now if you know you can run commands automatically when you open a file, what would you do?

1. You can load AutoLISP file automatically.
2. You can define new command. In the tutorial, we redefine PLOT command to update datalink before AutoCAD starts to plot.
3. You can run commands before you start working with your file.
4. You can set system variable before you start working.

In this article, we are going to focus to the last one. I found that there are many users confused why their AutoCAD doesn’t work as usual. And they become regular questions. These are some samples of changed system variables.

Common unexpected system variables change

These are several common system variables that change regularly.

1. File dialog box is missing. You have to type file path and file name from command line. It’s because FILEDIA system variable has changed.
2. AutoCAD default noun-verb selection becomes verb-noun selection. It’s because PICKFIRST system variable has changed.
3. Single document interface is activated. It’s controlled by SDI system variable.
4. And more…

There is a debate why they changed. Most people think that it was because routines in AutoLISP or other 3rd party applications. I used to be agree with it, until I saw this problem also happens in AutoCAD LT. So it remains a mystery to me.

We can force to set the variables in acaddoc.lsp

Harold Reuvers reminds me that we can set those variables in acaddoc.lsp. I prefer to backup my system variables and restore them when I have problem. We can’t remember all the variables, right?

However, if you have specific system variable that changes often, this is a good solution.

All you need is to create an acaddoc.lsp using notepad or visual LISP editor.

Just type these code:

(SETVAR "PICKFIRST" 1)

Feel free to add more lines or change system variables and values as you preferred.

If you want to learn how to use Visual LISP editor, see this basic AutoLISP tutorial.

What system variables do you find change often?

Do you find system variables in your AutoCAD change often? What are they?

Even though I found parametric feature is useful, I haven’t seen AutoCAD users use it intensively. My guess is because it’s too complicated for 2D drawings. I’m quite familiar with parametric features in Inventor. But I don’t think it would be useful in AutoCAD drawings.

Why not many people are using parametric design in AutoCAD?

1. Too complex

Although if you were working in mechanical design, creating parametric 2D drawing is very complicated. In Inventor we create simple sketches and constraint it, then create a feature from it. Then we create another sketch, constraint it, then create another feature. Most of the sketches are simple enough.

Sample image: parametric sketch in Inventor

This is how we draw in AutoCAD. Can you imagine how complex it would be, if we give constraint to the geometries?

We don’t draw everything in 2D then constraint the geometries. That would be too complex.

2. Only limited in 2D

If we can use it for 3D design, it would be great. But no, we can’t use parametric design in 3D. Only limited to 2D.

3. Only work for current model space

I was thinking if I can create user parameters then create simple sketches. Then I can create blocks, and use the parameters in my drawing. But again, I was stuck. I found that when I edit my block in block editor, I will not see my user parameter that I created in my drawing. I only able to use parameter in my model space. Not in my block, not even in my layout. There is no shared parameters here.

So when will parametric design be useful in AutoCAD?

Let’s think about where parametric design will work best:

1. It has to be simple.
2. Parametric design is very useful if we need to change dimension regularly. Either in design process or we use the drawing repeatedly.

If creating a parametric drawing consume more time than creating a regular drawing, then just forget about it. It may not worth the time you spent. So my best bet is to use it in block. We can use it when dynamic block can’t achieve what we want.

Download this window sample. This is a sample exercise in our AutoCAD Block Book.

Open the file, select the block, then click the arrow near the window. You can change the window size using the arrow. You may want to experiment by adding more values in the table, from block editor.

This block is quite simple. If you want to try to create your own, you can try this tutorial we published here.

Do you create parametric design regularly?

I wonder if anyone has been using constraints in AutoCAD regularly. How do you use it? Do you find it useful? Will you share with us here?

Sheet set is a neat way to organize your drawings in a project. You can get the advantages of Sheet Set properties by having additional fields. And don’t forget that it’s easy to send part of your projects (in a sub set) with e-transmit. It is also easy to plot all the drawings at once.

I was thinking to create a list to the videos, unfortunately I haven’t got the time to search her blog for them. Luckily, Jimmy Bergmark managed to compile the video links on his blog.

If you want to see the list, you can find the list here: Sheet Set Manager for AutoCAD LT videos.

If you want to learn about Sheet set in details, you can also purchase our e-book: Document management with AutoCAD Sheet Set.

This tip shows how to control display behavior if linked files overlap some objects in Revit. In some cases you might have met problems with correct display of linked objects located above other objects. You need to control display behavior of overlapping objects. If you know AutoCAD, you may remember command like DRAWORDER to solve the problem. How shall we do it in Revit. The answer is easy, just read this tip, please.

Example: You linked DWG with floor plan and created walls overlapping positions of doors and windows.

Tutorial:

1.    Link CAD file (eg. DWG file) via tab Insert – Link CAD

2.    Create walls (tab Home – Wall) using some methods (individual sketch or picking lines).

Situation: At this moment walls are overlapping sketch in imported symbol of CAD file and you don’t see positions of opening, windows, doors for insert objects in Revit model.

Workaround of control draworder in Revit:

3.    Select imported symbol and display palette Properties.

4.    Set Base Offset to value among Cut Plane – Top in View Range of Floor Plan.

5.    Now, you can see the difference:

Notice: Remember the value for Base Offset imported symbol must be among values for Cut Plane and Top in View Range for Floor Plan. To setup View Range parameter go to Properties palette if nothing in view is selected and click Edit.

In dialog View Range you can set the range of view.

Hope the tip helps you.

© Thomas Perkins – Fotolia.com

But we were just trying to get the job done quickly. It was pain when we need to modify the drawings. When we need to create schedules and drawing list we had to do them manually. Of course they were prone to mistakes. I remember our team failed to meet the deadline because we sent wrong drawings. Those were our pain when we were just trying to get the drawings done.

Yes those CAD software are impressive

Have you ever seen Revit, Inventor, or other vertical products demonstration? OK vertical products sounds so Autodesk, you might know them as BIM or PLM software. They were pretty impressive, weren’t they? Why they look very fast when working with those products?

1. They have many reusable components specific for your design. You can just place walls, doors, and windows in Revit. You can quickly add standard components from Inventor content library. Of course if you use them, you will need to create some of your own custom components. But after you created them once, you can quickly reuse them later.
2. Those objects are intelligent. You can create Bill of Materials in Inventor in seconds. You can quickly create various building component schedules in Revit. It’s because they have information. You also provide more information when you’re doing the design.
3. They are easy to modify. You can replace one standard component with another. You can change building components just by selecting other type from drop down menu.
4. The drawings are also intelligent. You can have orthogonal drawings and sections quickly. There are a bunch of information automatically placed on the title block.
5. And many more impressive features.

Sometimes we just use what we have

Not all companies can invest and purchase those sophisticated CAD software. It’s not always about budget. Sometimes you have to use software that project owners ask you to use it. There are several reasons that make us stay with what we use today: AutoCAD. Some of the reasons are pretty good reasons.

As a user, of course we just use it. And we do our best to improve how we work. Those software can give some ideas to imitate them in AutoCAD. Remember the wall in our dynamic block tutorial? It’s kind of look like Revit in 2D, isn’t it?

That’s why we are here on CAD notes, aren’t we? We’re looking for ways to complete our job, efficiently. Become more productive.

So we do these

That’s why I started this blog. We launched work better with AutoCAD program. It’s our framework, and we want to go to bit size tutorials and tips from it. Unfortunately we don’t get as many responses as we expected.

Your feedback is very important to improve our future articles. We need your experience and discuss with us in each topic.

If you’re interested, you can also share your experience in an article. Write for us.

We also launched e-books to improve your productivity.

AutoCAD Block Best Practices should help you to work with reusable contents. Not just placing common components, but also giving them information. And automate some process in your design.

Document management with AutoCAD sheet set should help you to manage your drawings. You can group all sheets in a project. You can get common information from that project to place them on title blocks. You can create sheet list quickly, and batch plot all drawings in your projects quickly.

You can help

You can help us to provide articles to help all readers. The easiest thing to do it is by actively involved in discussion. And you can write great articles for us.

What’s your opinion about CAD notes so far? Tell it in one word!

Of course you can write in a whole sentence or paragraph. But we can accept a word like ‘boring’ too.

Do you like what we’re doing here?

If you haven’t follow his tutorial, you really miss those great tools. If you don’t have time to follow the tutorial, Paul Munford shares his tool palette file, so you can just use them.

You can download the tool palettes and import it to your AutoCAD. Click here to download it.

How to: import tool palettes

If you never import tool palettes before, you can follow this guide:

Download and extract the tool palette to your local drive.

In AutoCAD, open your tool palettes. Right click on palette title bar, or click properties button. Choose customize palette from contextual menu.

In customize palette dialog, right click inside palettes column. The left column. Click import.

Find ACME VPORTS.xtp in folder you placed extracted file before. Click open.

This palette should be in the list now. Close this dialog and you should see it’s the active palette now.

Open layout and test those tools. You love it don’t you? I know I do!

This command string:

‘^C^C_line’

Is known as a command Macro, and you can create your own command Macro’s to help speed up your workflow.

In this post I want to share some commands Macro’s that I use to help me speed things up when I’m working with AutoCAD’s paper space viewports, and I’ll show you how to set these up on a tool palette for easy access.

Setting up.

Before we start work, I want you to open up your company standard AutoCAD template DWG file. Navigate to paper space, make your company standard viewport layer active and create a viewport. I’ve used a layer called ‘VPORTS’ for this exercise, but you should use the appropriate standard layer.

Tip: If you don’t have a company standard template read Edwin’s excellent post on templates here.

Setting up a tool palette.

In this post I am advising you to host your new tools on a tool palette, simply because tool palettes are easy to set up, maintain and migrate. You could apply these techniques in the CUI instead and build your custom commands into a tool bar or ribbon tab… but that’s for another time.

To open the tool palettes go to:

View Ribbon tab > Palettes panel > Tool Palettes

Or type ‘toolpalettes’ at the command line and hit Enter.

Now you have your tool palettes open, right click over any palette and choose ‘New Palette’. You can name your new palette anything you like; I’ve called mine ‘ACME VPORTS’.

Note: Tool palettes are not saved until the drawing is closed.

Creating a new tool

The next part is the fun bit. Click on the viewport you created earlier and drag and drop it onto the tool palette. You have now created your first tool – that was easy!

Note: Left Click on the viewport once to select it. Now with the viewport selected, left click again and hold the left hand mouse button down. You can now drag the viewport onto the palette to create the tool.

To test your tool, click on it. You should be prompted to draw a viewport. Once you’ve created a viewport, click on it once to select it. Notice which layer it’s on? That’s right; your new tool has created a viewport, on your company standard layer and it didn’t even change the current layer while it did it.

Note: This tool will also create the layer it needs if the layer does not already exist in the current drawing file.

I hope that you are already impressed – but we can do more.

How does it work?

To see what the tool is doing, right click over it and chose ‘Properties…’. I hope you notice the ‘Command string’ box, about half way down. The command string that this tool is running looks like this:

^C^C_vports

The ^C part of the macro is equivalent to pressing the ‘Esc’ key – it cancels the current command. This command uses ^C^C because some AutoCAD commands need two ‘escapes’ to completely cancel out of the currently command. It is good practice to start all your command Macro’s this way.

Note: Can you think of an AutoCAD command that would need THREE ‘escapes’ to fully cancel out of it? Answers in the comments please…

The underscore before the command is used to ‘Internationalize’ the command. If you are not working with the English language version of AutoCAD the command names will have been translated. The underscore tells AutoCAD to use the default English version of the command.

The ‘vports’ part of the string is exactly the same as typing ‘vports’ at the command line.

I also want you to notice the boxes under the ‘General heading’. You can see that this tool will create a viewport on the ‘VPORTS’ layer, and you can also override some of the other properties here.

Applying a little finesse.

There are a number of ways that you can personalize your new tool. You can change the name to something that makes more sense to you. You can change the description (the description value becomes a handy little tool tip when you hover over the tool on the palette). You can also change the picture by right clicking over the picture and choosing ‘specify image’.

Back to the Macro.

In this case the command string that has been created uses the ‘vports’ command by default. However, the vports command also has a purpose in Model space. Let’s change the tool to use the ‘mview’ command instead, which only works in paper space.

All you need to do is change:

^C^C_vports

To

^C^C_mview

More viewport creation tools.

To create more tools, just right click over the tool and chose ‘copy’ and then hover anywhere over the blank palette and choose ‘paste’.

Here is another example of an alternative command macro you could use:

^C^C_mview;f;

The semi-colon ‘;’ in this command strings is just like pressing ‘enter’ on your keyboard. So the macro could be read as:

Hit ‘esc’ twice, type ‘mview’ at the command line, hit ‘enter’, type ‘f’ at the command line and then hit ‘enter’ again.

Try it out. What do you get?

That’s right – a viewport, taking up all the available room on the drawing sheet. Writing this into a command Macro allows us to do all that with a single click!

How about this one:

^C^C_mview;2;v;

This command string launches the Mview command with the ‘Two viewports, vertically aligned’ options current. Just two clicks to create two viewports, on the right layer.

Here’s one more:

^C^C_mview;p

This command string uses the Mview command with the ‘Polygonal’ option to create an irregular shaped viewport.

The final one in this section gets a bit more complicated:

^C^C_circle;\\_mview;o;l

This command string creates a circular viewport. It does this by running the circle command, and then immediately afterward, running the Mview command using the option to create a viewport from the last object created, in this case our circle.

The two back slashes ‘\\’ are interpreted as pauses. In this case the user must pick the centre point and radius of the circle. This is two clicks – therefore two back slashes.

Note: It is not easy to include error checking in a command macro. In this case the macro expects two clicks, if the user decides to choose a method of creating a circle other than ‘Centre radius’ the command will fail. If you need to include error checking in your Macro’s you may need to use Lisp.

Locking and unlocking viewports globally.

For the next example, I want you to copy your tool as you did before; but this time, open the tools’ properties and set all the values in the ‘General’ options to ‘use current’ except the layer control, which you should change to ‘0’. In this case, our macro won’t be creating any geometry, so we don’t want those properties set.

The next example will help us speed up locking and unlocking viewports:

^C^C_mview;l;on;all;;

Run the command and then hit F2 to bring up the AutoCAD text window. Have a look to see what commands the Macro is executing…

That’s right; this command string locks all the viewports in the current layout – very handy to run before you close down your drawing for the day.

The reciprocal is this, which unlocks all the viewports in the current layout:

^C^C_mview;l;off;all;;

Turning the viewports layer on and off

To turn the ‘VPORTS’ layer on and off, we need to use the ‘layer’ command. Copy and paste the tool as before, and add this command string to turn the ‘VPORTS’ layer on:

^C^C_-la;on;VPORTS;;

And this command to turn the ‘VPORTS’ layer off.

^C^C_-la;off;VPORTS;;

I hope by now that you can work out what these macros are doing. If you aren’t sure, click the button to run the macro, and then hit F2 to bring up the command window and see what’s happened.

Note: Replace ‘VPORTS’ with your layer name. If you layer name contains a space, make sure that you put the layer name in quotes e.g. “VPORTS 1”. The layer name is not case sensitive.

Freezing and thawing the viewports layer

If you would prefer to freeze or thaw the VPORTS layer, you can use these two macros instead.

To freeze the ‘VPORTS’ layer:

^C^C_-la;f;VPORTS;;

To thaw the ‘VPORTS’ layer:

^C^C_-la;t;VPORTS;;

Round up and further reading

I hope that you enjoyed this post and that you found it useful. If you have any questions, please leave a comment below.

If you’d like to know more about Tool palettes, Edwin has a great tutorial here:

http://cad-notes.com/2009/09/creating-your-own-autocad-palette/

If you’d like to know more about command macros check out the developer help files. You can find the help files online here http://cadso.co/t17wRy.