I’m not sure how this happened but one day my coworker was trying to select multiple objects after starting a command but AutoCAD forced him to select one object at a time unless he explicitly told it to do a crossing window by typing C at the select prompt. This was very frustrating!

After asking around, someone in our office figured out that “Implied Windowing” was turned off.

If you ever run unto this, here is how you fix it:

Type PICKAUTO into the commandline and change it to 1.

I’m lazy so I like less keystrokes. For example when I am running the PEDIT command on an object that isn’t a polyline, I don’t want to be prompted with this every time:

Do you want to turn it into one? <Y>

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According to the AutoCAD help file, “Reconciling new layers is the process of manually reviewing new layers so that you can avoid potential errors before plotting your drawing or when restoring a layer state.” Read more »

I hope you had a good New Years. I sure did! I’m just getting back to blogging after a holiday break.

Have you ever been frustrated that your hatch patterns always cover other objects no matter how many times you set the draw order to send it to back? Read more »

I am trying to understand why companies use the “unitless” insertion scale (UNITS, INSUNITS) in their drawings as a standard. I’m sure there are uses for it, but I am having a hard time understanding. If you set your drawings to “unitless”, leave a comment here and tell me your reasoning. Read more »

Here are a few things you can do to help speed up AutoCAD. Read more »

Shaan Hurley wrote a great tip on publishing PDFs.

When plotting or publishing PDFs you can set it to publish individual PDF files or a single PDF file with many pages/sheets. The system variable is PUBLISHCOLLATE. 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 »

Have you ever noticed that when you select a bunch of objects in AutoCAD, sometimes their grips appear and sometimes they don’t? No, this isn’t a bug. It’s something called Grip Object Limit. Read more »

One of the most powerful features of AutoCAD is the ability for multiple people to work concurrently a project. A typical way this is done is by using XREFs. One person can be working on details, while another is working on the base map, while another is working on the preliminary design, and so on. Read more »

I learned about the system variable OSNAPZ from Lynn Allen’s Circles and Lines blog.

When snapping to 3D points AutoCAD will grab the x, y, and z. However there are times when you don’t want it to grab the z value. To do this, type OSNAPZ on the command line and set it to 1. Read more »