Polylines are your friends
Polylines are your friends. If you make more use of them, and learn more of the tricks and features of using them, you will, I believe, come to appreciate their many advantages…
Use Rays to speed up alignment tasks
Using the Ray tool in CAD to create or check alignments between views has many advantages over using normal lines. One is the speed with which you can create a large number of rays. Another is the ease of erasing the rays after you’re done . . .
Use a system to simplify and speed up your work
Repetitive CAD tasks can be carried out faster and more accurately if you have a system to apply to the work. What type of system works best? That depends on the task. Generally, a system works best when there are many similar or identical tasks that can be grouped together . . .
Using the split screen in AutoCAD for increased speed
When you find yourself doing lots of panning and zooming, you may be able to save time by splitting your screen into two or more panes. There are two basic ways to use the split screen. The first . . .
Snapping to hatch lines
Did you know that you can snap to hatch lines and other hatch objects if you want to, or change a setting and have OSNAP ignore all hatch lines if you prefer? The setting can be found in the Options dialog box…
Don’t let hatch objects obscure your linework
Here’s a CAD tip for anyone who has experienced having a hatch pattern cover up linework in a drawing, when you want the linework to display “in front of” the hatch pattern. This issue often comes up in xreffed drawings, but may also affect “live” drawings.
Getting shifty with Ortho
Did you know that the SHIFT key can be used to temporarily turn Ortho mode on and off? Here’s how…
Keeping Caps ON ALL THE TIME
If you want to make a setting that forces all letters typed in multitext objects to be capital letters, just open a multitext object, and while you are in the multitext editor, right-click to get the shortcut menu, and click on AutoCAPS.