Category Archives: Autocad Tips

If you need to make changes to all (or most) layers in a drawing, with this dialog displayed press Ctrl+A (or right click and choose Select All), then click the operation.  For example, if you click the linetype (or other) fields you are making changes to all selected items in the list.

If there are items you wish to exclude hold Ctrl while clicking to deselect them.

An extra tip along these lines.  You can press Ctrl+C to copy the properties of the selected rows to the clipboard, ready to paste into other applications like MS Excel, etc.

You may want to consider creating a backup of your profile(s) in AutoCAD.  Some add-ons may modify the profile in code (ours don’t) and you may make unintentional changes to the profile yourself.

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Users (especially with dual monitors) can sometimes move dialogs to the secondary monitor and AutoCAD will remember that position.  If the extra monitor is removed (or left behind by a notebook on the road) the dialog can’t be seen and the command appears to lock AutoCAD up.   To confirm, if press ESC to cancel control will return to the editor.  Here are a couple of ways to correct the problem.

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When designing blocks, it’s always best to create the geometry centered around the origin of 0,0.  Sometimes users can create a block from geometry in model space and it ends up difficult to use when inserting the block.

To correct this, issue the BEDIT command, select the misbehaving block, then use the move command to move the block elements to 0,0.  You may need to use a specific base point (such as the midpoint of a feature) to 0,0.

On starting the CUI command you may receive alerts about unresolved files that can no longer be found.  To clean these up, expand the ‘Partial Customization Files’ section and look along the list for items with an (Unresolved) suffix.  If you can’t resolve the item, right click and choose ‘Unload’.

Sometimes viewports imported (DesignCenter, etc) don’t display the contents, etc.  Issue the MVIEW command, use the ON option, and select the misbehaving viewports.

The component geometry used to create blocks should be created with a layer of 0, and other properties (especially color) set to a BYBLOCK setting.  That way it will take on the properties of the layer it’s inserted onto, or the specific properties you specify in the properties dialog.

Failure to do this can mean confusion.  For example if you create your block geometry on layer BLOCKGEOM, then insert them on a layer like INSERTS, you will find that layer INSERTS cannot be purged, even though there are no visible objects (when the layer BLOCKGEOM is frozen).  In this case the invisible insertion point prevents the layer purging.

This variable is often set to off (value of 0) when it should be turned on.  Newly created polylines take on the status of this variable.  This can create many negative effects.  For example when a dashed linetype is applied to polylines having dense vertices, the dash may not appear at all as the mask is reset on each vertex.  A second example is text based linetypes, if the linetype generation is turned off the letters will usually read wrong on curve segments.

If you have existing polylines created while the PLINEGEN variable was turned off, you can use the PROPS dialog to turn the linetype generation back on.

When using the background masking of Mtext, the extents of the box often reflects the window used when creating the mtext.  To resize this box to the minimum, double click the mtext object to bring up the mtext editor, then double click the <> icon in the ribbon that is just above it in the ruler bar.

If you have multiple mtext object to process, ToolPac contains a Mtext Minimum Size tool that processes a selection set.

You can use AutoCAD’s Block Editor to create copies of a block.  Simply issue the BEDIT command, choose the source block, then use the Block Editors ‘Save Block As’ icon and designate the new name.