The UCS in AutoCAD is a powerful tool. Typically the UCS is moved and rotated independently of the view. To make the view orientation match the UCS you can use the PLAN command. But there is a way to keep the plan orientation in sync with the UCS automatically. Read more »

Four years ago I wrote about selection sets in AutoCAD. All of these commands still work great but at that time the SELECTSIMILAR command was only available in AEC versions (Civil 3D, Architecture, etc.) of AutoCAD. I am happy to say that since version 2011 the command has been available in plain AutoCAD as well! Read more »

Have you ever had trouble making the display order of objects stay the way you want? Sadly the DRAWORDER command isn’t always as reliable as I would like it to be. Here is how I force the draw order to stick: Read more »

A few years ago Penny De Los Santos, a contributing photographer at Saveur Magazine, came to Seattle to teach a class on food photography. My wife and I went to a pre-class gathering to meet Penny and ask her questions about her craft and career. We both love photography and thought this event would be a good opportunity to get some inspiration. It was!

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Have you ever experienced a problem when you try to fillet a polyline only to have it fillet the wrong way? A tipster posted the answer to Cadalyst…

All you need to do is reverse the direction of the offending polyline (type PEDIT, select the polyline and type R for “reverse”) and try the fillet command again.

Todd, the other lazy drafter, wrote a really good post titled “Secrets to the Successful Drafter“. It’s really good. Go read it if you have the time.

Very inspiring Todd! Keep it up.

When we upgraded to AutoCAD 2012 I started to like and use the RIBBON. It took some getting used-to at first but I’ve learned to love it but I did have one major problem with it: the layers pull-down is on the “home” tab.

I love the layers pull-down because it quickly shows me the layer an object is on when I select something, but if I happen to be in another tab I can no longer see it. But I soon learned a trick thanks to Rick Ellis. Read more »

Autodesk introduced something called geometric constraints in AutoCAD 2010. They are very powerful and can help speed up drafting by saving keystrokes, picks and clicks. Check out this link from Lynn Allen to see what I mean.

Do you use geometric constraints in your day-to-day work?

Autodesk released a new version of AutoCAD and it has a lot of improvements. Check out this guide which shows what’s new. Are you upgrading to AutoCAD 2013? Why or why not?

Kate Morrical from LT Unlimited wrote a helpful blog post on managing annotation visibility. It can be confusing at first but annotation visibility is worth mastering. I use annotation scale visibility with dimensions, text and multileaders every day because it gives me even more control over how my drawings look. Here is what she said: Read more »

Hope, one of my readers, asked me how to draw a line tangent to two circles. This is a great question because it isn’t very obvious at first. Here’s how you do it. Read more »