CadGuruCool - Tips and Tricks

CadGuruCool
Tips and Tricks

CadGuruCool's Tips, Tricks and War Time Stories relating to :

a) AutoCAD (R10 - 2000),
b) AutoLISP, Visual LSP, DCL, etc.,
c) VBA,
d) 3DS Max,
e) HTML,
f) VBA.

Selecting all but one or two entities in a drawing or a group of objects

Many times I come across situations where I must select all entities in a drawing but leave one or two unselected.
By conventional sense a nerd may go round the undesirable entities and end up selecting with the window method four to five times or more.

The Trick is : At the select objects: prompt, type "all" (without the double quotes).Once everything seems to be selected, hold down the 'Shift' key and select just those entities that you wish to remove from the selection set and Presto ! the "shift-picked" entities are deselected.

When to use Undo and how is it different from OOPS

Because the OOPS command restores only the last erased group of entities, you may want to use UNDO instead.This is generally a mistake unless it's absolutely necessary; and you should definitetly not use UNDO on a routine basis. Even though UNDO will bring back a group of entities that were inadvertently erased; it undoes absolutely everything, step by step.

The Tip is : At the select objects: prompt, type "all" (without the double quotes).Once everything seems to be selected, hold down the 'Shift' key and select just those entities that you wish to remove from the selection set and Presto ! the "shift-picked" entities are deselected.

Putting up trees along a river in a jiffy !

No ! No ! You may not leave your home and go to the riverside to do this.

The Tip is : Simply follow these steps:

Step1 - Use the spline command to draw the road/river first.

Step2 - Draw the tree as you would like it to appear along the roadside or riverside.

Step3 - Make a block out of the tree and name it something you may not forget easily.

Step4 - Issue the divide command. When prompted to select objects to divide, select the spline

Step5 - At the No. of Segs.(or Block): type b. At the Block name: prompt, type the name of the block that you still remember.

At the align objects: prompt, type n and finally enter the number of trees you want.

Knowing the exact nature of errors in a DCL file

When an error occurs in a DCL file, unlike AutoLISP, it is not displayed at the command: prompt in AutoCAD.

Instead all the errors are written in a seperate file called ACAD.DCE You can find it in the current directory. But the ACAD.DCE file does not contain all the details by defalut.

The Tip is : Include the following statement at the beginning of your DCL file:

dcl_settings : defalut_dcl_settings {audit_level=3;}

A value of 3 for the audit_level attribute ensures that the error is pinpointed with the line number, along with the nature of error and a few suggestions to rectify the mistake.

Adding AutoCAD to the "Send to" menu

AutoCD has failed to establish its presence in the Windows Explorer except for new icons with every release.

But you can easily customize it to appear in the Send To menu that appears every time you right click on a file in the Explorer.

Follow these steps:

1) Launch Windows Explorer with the Win+E key combination. (The Win key is to the right of the left Ctrl Key)

2) Locate the Send To folder in the Windows/Win98 folder.

Here you may see shortcuts to your disk drives and/or mail recipient, etc.

3) Right click in the clear area between the icons and select New > shortcut.

4) Click on browse... and locate your acad.exe file. Click the Next > button.

5) Type AutoCAD in the edit_box.

6) Finally click on Finish. Press F5 to refresh if necessary.

Hence forth you can right click on any AutoCAD file in the explorer and open it in AutoCAD through the Send To Menu.

The Tip is : Infact you can now include any program in the Send To menu. Simply follow the above steps and instead of the acad.exe file, locate the executable of your favourite program and send it a file instantly.

More Tips : This way you can create a shortcut to notepad in the Send To context menu and send all those read.me and readme.now files without having to face the Open With dialog.

In case of notepad, you may not browse for the notepad.exe file. Simply typing the filename notepad.exe will do. Windows automatically knows the location of its own programs.

Drop in the MSpace or on the Titlebar

When drag-and-dropping dwg files from the Windows Explorer into AutoCAD, there is a difference when you drop them in different parts of the interface :

The Tip is : 1. When you drop the file(s) in the model space, the drawing is inserted as a block asking you for the scale and rotation angle further.

Whereas, if you drop it on the titlebar of AutoCAD, the drawing is opened in AutoCAD.

Don't Forget to close your drawings

Now that AutoCAD 2000 gives you a multiple drawing interface, your drawings are no longer automatically close as you open a new one.

The Tip is : It's a lot better than having two or more sessions of AutoCAD open at one time in order to work in more than one drawing. But as you have more and more drawings open, there is a drain on the memory of your computer.

If you are not careful, you may wind up with six or seven drawings active in memory even without realizing it. If you need to see how many drawings are active, type Ctrl+Tab or pick Window from the pulldown menus. Next, Tile Horizontally, vertically or cascade them.

For more tips and tricks on Solid Edge - Click here