Receiving drawings from outside (or even from others within your own company) can be a wee bit aggravating sometimes. This month covers the Reference option in the Scale and Rotate commands that might give you a bit more leverage in your productivity. You'll also find out about a buried feature called BASE, that enables you to assign a basepoint to a drawing. And if you've always wondered if you can set up AutoCAD to 'see' the hidden lines in another format, AutoCAD 2002 has the answer. You may also pick up a trick in the Basics section where we cover text justification.
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Blessings to one and all,
Michael
There are two commands that have a Reference option but you have to know when and how to use it. In this section we'll take a look at the Scale and Rotate commands and where to use the Reference option.
SCALE / Reference - What if you get a drawing from the outside and it is not 1:1? The width of a door isn't 3'0" (or 900), but something squirrely like 4.975. Clearly not a metric factor nor a factor of 12. Give this a shot:
Note: You may want to consider saving the current Layer State (Save State in the Layer dialog) prior to doing this.
ROTATE / Reference - Occasionally we inherit drawings from others in which the objects are not 'square'. Somehow the rotation of the objects got convoluted and we have to straighten them up.
Pick the first point of the skewed angle… | Pick the second point to define the skewed angle |
I was hunting for something in A2002 and stumbled on this. If you want to see the hidden lines of a 3D drawing, use the "Obscured" variables.
OBSCUREDLTYPE
Available settings:
OBSCUREDLTYPE settings | |
---|---|
1 | Solid |
2 | Dashed |
3 | Dotted |
4 | Short Dash |
5 | Medium Dash |
6 | Long Dash |
7 | Double Short Dash |
8 | Double Medium Dash |
9 | Double Long Dash |
10 | Medium Long Dash |
11 | Sparse Dot |
OBSCUREDCOLOR
Enter the color number of your choice.
It's pretty easy. Once you have a drawing with 3D objects (solids, optimally), simply enter the values for these obscure variables (literally) and run the Hide command.
When using WBLOCK to save selected objects as a .dwg file, you have the opportunity to establish the base point by which that drawing will be "held" when inserting it into another drawing. When you insert a drawing file that was not created using Wblock, however, AutoCAD presumes the base point for that inserted file to be 0,0 by default. To specify a point other than 0,0 as the drawing's base point without using Wblock, type BASE at the Command line and pick a point to be used as the base point for the drawing when it's inserted.
When you want to center Dtext in a circle, use one of the Justify options.
[Align/Fit/Center/Middle/Right/TL/TC/TR/ML/MC/MR/BL/BC/BR]:
Note: If you were not prompted for a height, that means the height of the current text Style has been preset. You can edit the height of the text using the Properties window after entry if necessary.
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