Due to limited time and because I’m feeling lazy today, this is going to be a short post.

Ever wonder how to properly explode a block that contains attributes without having the text revert to the attribute tag? Try the BURST command. It a special “explode” command made for blocks with attributes.

See, I told you this was short.

This has got to be the easiest way to create a block out of existing linework. The first step is to select some linework:

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At the request of Murph, I will show you how to create a block that will display the bearing in degrees, minutes, and seconds (DMS) using an AutoCAD Field.

It’s actually very simple. Let’s get started. Read more »

Recently I was asked to create a grid that labels the Northings & Eastings on a map. There are a couple of ways you could do this: 1) If you have Civil 3D, create a point style that labels the Northing & Easting. 2) If you have AutoCAD create a block that displays the Northing & Easting with fields.

If you have Civil 3D, the point-style method works the best but today I am going to show you how to use fields to make this happen. Read more »

Want to know a quick way to rename something in your drawing? Read more »

There may be times when you would want to turn on/off the dialog box when inserting an attributed block into your drawings. For example, if you are creating a script or macro that inserts an attributed block you might want to set ATTDIA to 0 (zero) at the beginning so that the it will prompt for attributes on the command line only. Read more »

This Express Tools command may not be new to some of you but I thought I would share anyway. Type the command SUPERHATCH on the command line and you will get this: Read more »

A while back, I received some survey data in the form of a comma-delimited text file containing rows of Northings, Eastings, & elevations. I needed to take that information and place blocks at every location in my drawing. At the time I only had plain AutoCAD (I wasn’t using Civil 3D yet). Being lazy, I wasn’t about to sit there and type the coordinates by hand. So I wrote a script! Here is how I did it. Read more »

The BREAKLINE command is an Express Tools command that creates a line to represent a partial view of a drawing that looks something like this:

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When Autodesk released AutoCAD 2007 I noticed that when I inserted a block or XREF it would sometimes scale up or down in a way I didn’t expect. After a little digging in the help file I found these system variables: INSUNITS, INSUNITSDEFSOURCE, & INSUNITSDEFTARGET. Read more »