Dork Side Tips: Repath Xrefs, Snip Xrefs, Prevent Palette Docking

 

Just for Reference…

Do you need to re-path x-refs for a large number of drawings? A quick and easy way to accomplish this is by using the Reference Manager application. Go to your Windows Start menu, click Programs, then Autodesk, then AutoCAD, and you’ll find the Reference Manager application. Click the Add Drawings button, and the program will show you the data for each of the selected drawing. Once you select the necessary attachments, you’ll be able to edit a path or perform a Find and Replace on them.

For a first look at how'd you'd go about programming something yourself, using lisp and scripts, check out this class called "Changing Hundreds of AutoCAD Drawings in a Hurry." 

Snip Snip

Working in a large hospital, our projects are usually a pretty small part of each massive floor plate, so we use the XCLIP command quite a bit to omit irrelevant extents of a plan. Did you know that, since AutoCAD 2008, you can invert the clip selection, cutting a hole in your existing plan that you can fill in with new data?

Selecting the xref will bring up the contextual External Reference ribbon tab. Select Create Clipping Boundary, select Invert clip (or type I), then select a polyline boundary or drag a rectangle around the needed area.

Prevent Docking

To move a Tool Palette out of your way without having it dock on the edge of your screen, simply hold down the Control key while you’re moving it and it will remain floating.

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Dork Side Tips: C'mon baby, lets DVIEW Twist

I hope I gave everyone an earworm with that punny section heading, because I can't call the DVIEW command without breaking into song.
Continuing on with my Tips from the Dork Side...

C'mon baby, let's DVIEW Twist

Buildings are never built perfectly in line with magnetic north, or with each other. My campus’s plan (see yesterday's blog post for a brief explanation of how my campus is assembled) is accurate in direction, but, that means that when I want to use AutoCAD to print out a floor plan for just one of the buildings, they will not appear straight on the plot. I set up layouts for each of the buildings, so that I can print them ‘straight’.

Pull up a layout tab and click into the viewport, zooming into your preferred area. Type DVIEWand select an object. You will be prompted to select from different available options, type TW for the twist option, then rotate the view for best fit, without having moved the modelspace entities at all.

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Dork Side Tips: Lay it all out

This tip from the dork side bears a little more explanation when it is standalone.

Working in a large facility inside the city limits, our construction is, by necessity, always butting up against another building. Obviously, once that happens, renovations often spill over from one building to another. So, also by necessity, our floor plates, and thereby our background plans, cover all of the buildings in a single file. 

I created a composite set for each discipline (ease of use for mechanics, engineers and future renovations for each trade):

Mechanical Ductwork

Mechanical Piping

Domestic Water

Electrical Power

Electrical Lighting

Electrical - Auxiliary Systems (nurse call, fire alarms, etc)

Fire Protection Piping

While I work on the Engineering staff, and we are not responsible for the architectural components, I have recently started two additional sets just for reference:

Architectural - Reflected Ceiling Plans

Architectural - Room Usage 

For each of these sets, I copy over the content from each renovation project's record documents.

All I started with was a set of floor plans, so I had to create each of the above-mentioned sets from scratch. Obviously, I created one, and used it as a template for the remainder (using the below tip, the Sheet Set Manager or SSM, and recently, Fields for the titleblocks).

Now for the tip:

After I set up separate layouts for each building on a given level, I want to import the layouts into the drawing for another level. Open up your next drawing and just right-click on a layout tab and select From Template…, change the Files of Type: selection to .dwg and select the drawing you just set up your layouts in. You will be able to select one or more of the layouts available in the drawing you are using as your template.

You can also import layouts into other drawings by using Design Center, although this will not bring along their Page Setups. Go to the Output tab of the ribbon and click the Page Setup Manager to import from there, if needed.

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Dork Side Tips: Speel Chocker

Continuing to share bite-sized tips, broken out from my recent AutoCAD Tips and Tricks article (pdf archives, library entry).

We all need spell checking at times, let’s face it. Pull up the SPELL command by clicking Check Spelling on the Text panel of the Annotate tab. 

The default dictionary might be fine for most uses, but, you can also make your clients happy by clicking the Dictionaries… button and adding custom words. I’m serious here, take a couple of seconds to input a company (or building or occupant) name correctly in your dictionary (e.g. Shoenberg. I've got one drawing set where this building name is spelled four different ways. It's not that hard folks. #1 look at your starting blueprints. #2 look at the name carved on the outside of the building #3 be a responsible CAD Manager and run spell check on client-specific words because all of your designers or drafters tend to get creative.) so you can check consistency and ensure that your client does not get irritated by seeing your drawing set with numerous incorrect variations. 

While spelling has little to do with the quality and value of the design that gets built in the field, it does display professionalism and attention to detail and avoids offending anyone whose family legacy has paid for said building.

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Dork Side Tips: Selection Selection

I recently wrote an article, for AUGIWorld Magazine, called Tips from the Dork Side. It can be found in it's complete form in the AUGIWorld Archives, and in the AUGI Library. Hehe, don't you love the article image? Debbie Gwaltney, the layout artist on this issue, found this picture and thought it was just too perfect. It makes me smile every time I see it.

At any rate, my favorite tips for AutoCAD are almost always short and sweet, so, I'm going to post them here in little bite-sized chunks.

Selection Selection

There are a few different ways to go about selecting entities to examine or modify, depending on your specific needs at the time. If you were to select every single entity in a drawing, when you bring up the Properties palette, you notice that some properties are not available for editing. That is because different entity types do not all have the same properties. You have to filter out dissimilar entities, so that you can access the controls you need. The following paragraphs contain four different ways of creating selection sets, select your favorite!

One of the easier ways to get a group of objects together for mass editing would be through the Isolatecommand, available on the Layers panel of the Home tab. You select an object or objects on the layers you want to see, and this command will hide the remainder of the layers for you. You can also start and reverse the command by typing in LAYISO and LAYUNISO.

A more precise method for selecting objects is Quick Select. You can find this command on your right-click menu, on the top of the Properties palette, or by typing QSELECT. In the command’s dialog box, you see that you’ve got a couple more options to get more specific in your object selection. You can control what portion of your drawing the selection will draw from, which types of entities are included in your selection set, which properties the desired objects have, and what values you want to include or exclude. Say, I want to grab all Polyline entities whose layer color is <> not equal to BYLAYER. I might not want to grab all entities in the drawing and set them all to bylayer, because I might have some annotation in the drawing that needs to remain a distinct color for some temporary reason. Or, perhaps I want to grab all Text on layer A-Rm-Num that is less than 9” tall, I can quickly and easily do that here.

If you use the Filtercommand, bringing up the Object Selection Filters dialog, you see how precise you can be in selecting objects, and you can even save the filter criteria for future use.

Another, more recent, addition is the Select Similar command. It has been available in vertical products for many years, and I was thrilled when it was finally added to vanilla AutoCAD. If you’re using release 2010 or earlier, you can find lisp routines which will provide this functionality. There is code available in the forums and on myMistress of the Dorkness blog, along with instructions on adding it to your right-click menu. I like the way it works, being a part of your shortcut menu, because you don’t have to interrupt your workflow by using a dialog box or moving out of the drawing area to click a button. Type SELECTSIMILAR then SE to access the Select Similar Settings dialog box and dictate which criteria you prefer to gather your selection by.

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