Category Archives: AutoCAD

Grammar and AutoCAD

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I have a lot of posts about AutoCAD and a few about grammar, but I expect this will be the only post I ever make that combines the subjects.

Autodesk founder John Walker, a very prominent figure in AutoCAD’s history, has written an article about the correct use of the apostrophe. While I enjoyed it, I think it’s too insulting to be useful. People struggling with the correct use of the apostrophe are unlikely to get past the part where they are called morons, to read the useful advice below.

If you just want simple apostrophe advice without being belittled, I suggest you look at the main page of the The Apostrophe Protection Society instead.

AutoCAD tip – more on the Oops command

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In a comment on my Five More Simple Tips for AutoCAD post, Jeremy had some questions about the Oops command. I thought I would explain the command in more detail in another post so more people will see it.

The first thing to understand is that Oops varies from Undo/U in that it only reverses those commands that erase objects. The Erase command is obvious, and the same applies to pre-selecting objects and hitting the Delete key, but the Block and Wblock commands can also erase the objects that go to make up the block. In such cases Oops can be used to restore those objects without undoing the block creation step.

Another difference is that unlike Undo, you can only go back one step with Oops. If you erase one set of objects and later erase another set, issuing two Oops commands will not restore the first set of objects. Where Oops has the advantage is that it can unerase something that you erased 100 commands ago, without undoing the intervening 99 commands.

What happens if you use Oops when there is nothing to unerase? Nothing. Oops simply returns to the Command prompt. Also, there is no short form of the Oops command in standard AutoCAD. O invokes Offset, OO does nothing and OP invokes Options.

Finally, the U and Undo commands interfere with Oops. I suspect this is what Jeremy was seeing when the command wasn’t working for him. To see what I mean, select and right-click > Copy the following commands. In an empty drawing, right-click > Paste them into the Command prompt area:

_.Zoom _Win 0,0 10,5
_.Line 1,0 1,2

_.Line 2,0 2,2

_.Line 3,0 3,2

_.Line 4,0 4,2

_.Erase 1,1 2,1

_.Line 5,0 5,2

_.Line 6,0 6,2

_.Move 5,1 6,1  5,3 7,3

This command sequence zooms to a suitable area, draws four lines, erases the first two, draws another two and then moves them to the right. If you use Oops immediately after that, the first two lines will return. However, if instead of doing that you first undo the Move command and then use Oops, the lines will not return.

AutoCAD 2009 – The Prequel Part 15 – Background

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You may have noticed that the default AutoCAD background is an off-white shade. In a comment, Tim asked if this is the same as the Block Editor background. No, not quite. This image shows the different backgrounds and some linework, with black as a comparison:

AutoCAD 2009 Backgrounds

Paper space is pure white (Red, Green, Blue is 255,255,255), Model space is very pale cream (254,252,240) and the Block Editor is a slightly darker cream (255,252,229). In common with most people in my experience (and most people who need to use drawings with yellow linework), my backgrounds are all going to be 0,0,0 (black). I don’t want to make a big fuss about this, because it’s very easy to change, but I find it kind of funny how this has flip-flopped over the years. There’s a poll about this to the right if you haven’t already seen it.

AutoCAD 2009 – The Prequel Part 14 – What do you think?

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I’m interested in people’s perceptions of the forthcoming AutoCAD release. Based on what you’ve seen so far, how good a release do you think it will be? Please speculate using the poll on the right. If you feel the poll doesn’t give you the opportunity to adequately express yourself, feel free to add a comment here.

I intend to follow this up in a few months with a similar poll when people have had a chance to use the shipping product. It’s not scientific, but it will be interesting to see if actually using the product changes people’s opinions.

AutoCAD 2009 – The Prequel Part 13 – ViewCube

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For many 3D users of AutoCAD, the ViewCube is likely to be the most useful new thing in AutoCAD 2009. There are a couple of problems with it, at least in the Release Candidate:

  1. It does not work in 2D wireframe mode (which is, paradoxically, where 90% of my 3D work is done). You need to choose another visual style before it will appear.
  2. It seems to slow things down quite a lot in complex drawings.

That said, if you have more than enough computing power for the drawings you usually deal with, then this is a very, very nice interface addition. You can just pick intuitively on the various parts of the ViewCube and your view of the model changes accordingly. You can also click and drag on the cube, and it will move where you place it, while snapping on to the various 45 and 90 degree view directions when you get near them, in the same way that Polar snap works. There is a right-click menu with a bunch of useful options, including a quick and easy switch between parallel and perspective views.

Messing with the ViewCube

You can also easily switch between User Coordinate Systems using the little menu thing under the cube. Unlike some of AutoCAD 2009’s new user interface elements, the ViewCube looks like a finished, polished tool and provides a genuine boost to productivity. Beautiful.

AutoCAD 2009 – The Prequel Part 12 – Controlling Screen Elements

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How do you turn the new screen elements on and off using the keyboard? How about the not-so-new ones? See this table:

Element On Off Toggle
Advanced Render Settings RPPREF RPPREFCLOSE  
Clean Screen CLEANSCREENON CLEANSCREENOFF Ctrl+0
Command line COMMANDLINE COMMANDLINEHIDE Ctrl+9
dbConnect DBCONNECT DBCCLOSE Ctrl+6
DesignCenter ADCENTER ADCCLOSE Ctrl+2
Layer palette LAYER LAYERCLOSE  
Lights LIGHTLIST LIGHTLISTCLOSE  
Markup Set Manager MARKUP MARKUPCLOSE Ctrl+7
Materials MATERIALS MATERIALSCLOSE  
Menu bar MENUBAR 1 MENUBAR 0  
NavCube NAVCUBEDISPLAY 1 NAVCUBEDISPLAY 0  
Properties palette PROPERTIES PROPERTIESCLOSE Ctrl+1
Quick calc QUICKCALC QCCLOSE Ctrl+8
Ribbon RIBBON RIBBONCLOSE  
Rollover tool tips ROLLOVERTIPS 1 ROLLOVERTIPS 0  
Sheet Set Manager SHEETSET SHEETSETHIDE Ctrl+4
Status bar STATUSBAR 1 STATUSBAR 0  
Status bar
tray icons		 TRAYICONS 1 TRAYICONS 0  
Tool palette TOOLPALETTES TOOLPALETTESCLOSE Ctrl+3
Tool tips TOOLTIPS 1 TOOLTIPS 0  
Visual Styles VISUALSTYLES VISUALSTYLESCLOSE  

AutoCAD 2009 – The Prequel Part 11 – Docked Vertical Ribbon

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This video shows how the AutoCAD 2009 vertical Ribbon behaves when it is docked on one side. The labels explain what is going on.

AutoCAD 2009 Docked Vertical Ribbon

The main thing that used to drive me batty with the Dashboard was the way in which expanding one panel would contract another. The vertical Ribbon doesn’t do that, it leaves panels how you left them, which I much prefer.

Something else you may have noticed is that when there is no docked horizontal Ribbon, the red A in the corner shrinks. I’ll describe what’s lurking beneath that A in future posts.

Five More Simple Tips for AutoCAD

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More simple AutoCAD tips, as promised:

  1. If you erase some objects, draw a few things and then want your erased objects back without losing the things you drew in the meantime, enter OOPS rather than undoing the commands.
  2. At any Select objects: prompt, you can select using a triangle, non-orthogonal rectangle or other odd shapes, by entering the WPolygon (WP) or CPolygon (CP) options.
  3. If you have a paper space viewport entirely inside another one, it can be hard to make that viewport current just by picking in it. Try Ctrl+R to cycle through viewports instead.
  4. Move some objects, rotate them to match something and optionally even scale them to match too, all with the ALIGN command (Modify > 3D Operations > Align). Despite the menu location, this command is great for both 2D and 3D work.
  5. The ID command tells you where a point lies in space. In many cases you can do that without a command. Select the object, hover over a grip, look at the coordinate display in the bottom left corner. For this to work, the coordinate display can’t be frozen. If it is, double-click on it to free it up.

AutoCAD 2009 – The Prequel Part 10 – Dude, where’s my Dashboard?

Dude, Dashboard’s dead. Defunct. Done. AutoCAD 2009 replaced the Dashboard with the Ribbon. If you type in the DASHBOARD or DASHBOARDCLOSE commands, they are just converted to the RIBBON and RIBBONCLOSE commands, which turn the Ribbon on and off.

If you’re a fan of the Dashboard (and I never was), there is good and bad news. The good news is that you can right-click on various parts of the Ribbon, pick Undock and you get a Dashboard-like floating vertical Ribbon that can be resized and configured very easily in terms of turning panels on and off. You can’t do that with Microsoft’s Office 2007 Ribbon. Performance aside (more on that later), I generally prefer the way the vertical Ribbon works, compared with the Dashboard. But I’m still not a fan.

AutoCAD 2009's Vertical Ribbon

The bad news is that if you put a lot of effort into customising your Dashboard in 2008, your work is lost. There is currently no automated migration path from your Dashboard to the Ribbon, so it’s time to start again. This involves using CUI, and unfortunately the process is slow and immensely frustrating. This is due to a combination of the long-standing CUI shortcomings and a set of new ones introduced to go with the Ribbon. Buy yourself one of those squeezy stress-ball things, you’re going to need it.

Five Simple Tips for AutoCAD

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As my forced change to a different blog theme (thanks IE7) has meant the demise of my random AutoCAD tip feature, you may as well have the tips in a blog post instead. Here are the first five. These are fairly simple tips that apply to all recent releases. You probably know most of them, but just in case…

  1. If you need to draw circles, slots or rectangles around multiple text objects, use the Express Tools command TCIRCLE (Express > Text > Enclose Text with Object).
  2. When using the TRIM or EXTEND command, you don’t have to select any edges. Just hit Enter and AutoCAD will assume all of the visible objects are to be used.
  3. The TRIM or EXTEND commands can be used in place of each other by using the Shift key. When picking an object in TRIM, hold down Shift and the object will extend.
  4. The MULTIPLE command will force the next command you enter to repeat until you hit Esc. In CUI or menu macros, you can do something similar by starting the macro with *^C^C instead of just ^C^C.
  5. You can fillet or chamfer all vertices of a polyline at once. Use the FILLET or CHAMFER command’s Polyline option and pick just once instead of picking every corner twice.

That’s it for now, five more tips later.

AutoCAD 2009 – The Prequel Part 9 – Docked Toolbars

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If AutoCAD 2009’s floating toolbars are the best ever, what about when they’re docked? As a starting point, here is AutoCAD 2008 with the Express Tools toolbars docked.

AutoCAD 2008 Docked Toolbars

Here is the same thing in AutoCAD 2009.

AutoCAD 2009 Docked Toolbars

So a few pixels have been shaved off in one direction and added in another. The end result is that they use about 99% of the space used in 2008. Not too bad, but I think it could be better. Here’s my suggestion:

AutoCAD 2009 Docked Toolbars Suggestion

That uses about 80% of the space. In addition to shaving off a few more pixels, I think this looks a lot neater. I find AutoCAD 2009’s dark grey bars between toolbars ugly and distracting. Not at all cute, unlike their floating counterparts. The bars don’t seem to serve any useful purpose, so hopefully they will go away in a later release.

My own personal preference would be to shave off even more pixels, but the above would do as a compromise between compact efficiency and a pretty face.

There are many other areas of AutoCAD 2009’s new interface that should have the razor applied, with both practical and aesthetic benefits. I will return to those areas later.

AutoCAD 2009 – The Prequel Part 8 – Vista Startup Times

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I’ve now tested startup times of various AutoCAD releases under Vista. Here are the results, alongside the XP results for ease of comparison:

Release First
Startup		 Subsequent
Startup
XP Vista XP Vista
12 8.6 – 8.2 –
13 2.6 1.8 1.3 0.8
14 2.1 – 0.5 –
2002 3.2 2.1 0.6 1.1
2004 – 4.3 – 1.7
2005 – 7.9 – 4.5
2006 14.9 8.7 2.6 4.4
2007 13.8 11.9 3.5 6.6
2008 14.6 10.5 3.6 6.0
2009 28.9 17.3 7.2 13.3

Same caveats as before, plus the following:

  1. Some AutoCAD releases were not installed on both XP and Vista partitions, hence the gaps in the table.
  2. The Vista tests were performed on the same PC as the XP tests.
  3. The system had a 1 GB USB key hanging out the back, giving Vista a theoretical startup benefit over XP.
  4. It’s very difficult to get meaningful performance results out of Vista because its SmartFetch and ReadyBoost technologies are doing their best to improve performance without user intervention. I may be a geek, but I’m not a good enough geek to be able to tell what Vista was doing behind my back during these tests.
  5. Repeated startups of AutoCAD 2009 revealed a gradual improvement in startup performance. Startup times went 17.3, 13.3, 12.5, 12.5, 11.0 seconds.

Make of that what you will. In short, in my tests AutoCAD 2009 startup time in Vista is still roughly double that of its recent predecessors and about ten times longer than older releases like R13 and 2002.

AutoCAD 2009 – The Prequel Part 7 – Subsequent Startup Time

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This table shows both the initial and subsequent startup times for various releases. Most of the qualifications and caveats from my AutoCAD 2009 – The Prequel Part 6 – Initial Startup Time post still apply here.

Release First
Startup		 Subsequent
Startup
12 8.6 8.2
13 2.6 1.3
14 2.1 0.5
2002 3.2 0.6
2006 14.9 2.6
2007 13.8 3.5
2008 14.6 3.6
2009 28.9 7.2

AutoCAD 2009’s subsequent startups are much less slow than its agonising first startup, as to be expected. Windows XP is doing that by caching and reusing recently used parts of memory. Release 12’s old code, running in 16-bit emulation, is not able to take advantage of that. It’s definitely an unfair test of Release 12 on this system.

In my tests, AutoCAD 2009 startups (both initial and subsequent) are about twice as slow as other recent releases. Users of older releases on modern systems can enjoy startup performance over ten times better.

AutoCAD 2009 – The Prequel Part 6 – First Startup Time

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One thing you’ll notice (and dislike) right away with AutoCAD 2009 is that it takes a lot longer to get started. How much longer? About twice as long as recent releases, or about ten times longer than ancient speed demon Release 13. (I bet a 1994 AutoCAD user transported forward in time would be shocked to hear that description being used). Here’s a video that shows what the first startup looks like in a collection of releases from Release 12 to 2009:

AutoCAD First Startup Time Comparison

Now for the qualifications and caveats:

  1. Tests performed on a Core2Duo E6600 PC with 4 GB RAM, under Windows XP SP2 32 bit.
  2. This is not a strictly scientific comparison. Only one system restart and settle-down period was performed prior to timing all releases one after the other. Strictly, each test should get its own restart and settle-down period.
  3. Anti-virus and other security software was left on, but was not performing a scan, during the tests.
  4. This is the first startup time only. Subsequent startup times during the same Windows session are quicker, and this subject may be the subject of further coverage.
  5. Vista startup times may be better, particularly if you leave a spare USB key hanging out of your PC and allow Vista to use it to improve system performance. This may also be the subject of further coverage.
  6. The AutoCAD 2009 time is for the Release Candidate, not the shipping product. It’s possible that Autodesk managed to wring more performance out of 2009 before the code hit the manufacturing stage.
  7. Application startup time should not be used as an indication of overall performance. It’s just one aspect of it.

If you only start AutoCAD once a day, it’s not a significant issue. If, like me, you start AutoCAD dozens of times a day, it becomes rather wearing.

AutoCAD 2009 – The Prequel Part 5 – Floating Toolbars

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There are many areas of AutoCAD 2009’s new user interface that pointlessly waste your screen space. Floating toolbars do not. You have probably already noticed that AutoCAD 2009 concentrates on the Ribbon as its primary screen-based user interface, with the default state lacking any toolbars at all. So it’s somewhat ironic that AutoCAD 2009 sports what are easily the best floating toolbars in the history of the product. Ironic but very welcome.

Why are they better? Because they’re smaller. Let’s compare the number of pixels taken up by a typical small group of floating toolbars in different AutoCAD releases. These are the Express toolbars, which I mocked up in Releases 13 and 14 to show the same number of buttons and dividers (the Release 14 Bonus toolbars had more buttons than shown here). This provides for a totally fair comparison of the interface itself.

Floating Toolbar Comparison

Using Release 13 as the base for comparison, Release 14 uses 103% of the number of pixels, AutoCAD 2000 to 2008 use 93%, and AutoCAD 2009 uses only 43%. That is, it’s 2.3 times more space-efficient than Release 13 and 2.15 times more efficient than any recent release. Good stuff!

This space efficiency is gained at the expense of having a visible toolbar label. So how can you find your way around a bunch of floating toolbars as you get used to things? Hover over the dark grey area to the right of the toolbar and a tooltip will show you what’s what.

Floating Toolbar Tooltip

Thanks for the welcome

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A belated thank you to Kiwi Robin Capper for his welcome to the CAD blog world. Here’s a snap I took of Robin at Autodesk University 2006:

Robin Capper

Similarly, thanks to Lynn Allen for linking to my post about her famous Cell Phone Story. Here she is, also at AU 2006, presenting me with a signed copy of her excellent book AutoCAD: Professional Tips and Techniques which I won by skillfully (ahem) waving my arms furiously at the right moment during her presentation.

Lynn and Steve

Finally, thanks to Shaan Hurley for welcoming me to the blog fold. Here is one of the more sensible shots I have of him at AU 2006. You really don’t want to see the others.

Shaan and Steve

AutoCAD on Linux – Video

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Lots of people get excited at the prospect of AutoCAD running under Linux. I’m not one of those people, but for those of you that are, here’s a video from a Linux enthusiast that shows AutoCAD running in an environment that’s doing all kinds of cool geeky stuff. It’s not mine and it’s from October 2006:

YouTube Link

Cool if you like that kind of thing, that is. I think the effects would drive me mad after a short period of dorkoid enthusiasm, but of course being Linux it would all be under complete user control.

Before you get too excited, I should point out that this is AutoCAD 2000, that is, software from last century. It’s running on Ubuntu Dapper with XGL installed and it required the copying of DLLs around from a Windows installation. It’s not supported (of course), and there’s no way of seeing what the real-world drafting performance and reliability is like. It’s a cool fun exercise for somebody with far more nerdish street cred than myself, but it’s not an environment I would use to earn a living.

AutoCAD 2009 – The Prequel Part 4 – More on the Status Bar and Layouts

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Here are a couple more tricks AutoCAD 2009 has up its Status Bar sleeve, this time to do with layouts.

You may love the new Quick View Layouts feature or you may find it too slow. You may wish to use it sometimes and at other times use the traditional layout tabs. How do you quickly switch from one to the other? Right click, as shown in this animation. The left clicks are red, the right clicks are blue.

As you can see, when the layout tabs are visible, the model space button and most recent layout button are replaced by a traditional PAPER or MODEL label. Something you can’t see in the animation is that when you hover over a layout tab, a preview of that layout is displayed at the cursor, thus:

AutoCAD tip – persuade Open to highlight your drawing

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In AutoCAD, when you have a drawing open and you go to open another, does Open automatically scroll down and highlight your current drawing?

This can be very handy when you’re working your way though a set of drawings. If this isn’t happening for you, here’s how to make it do so.

In Explorer, go to Tools > Folder Options > View tab and turn off the toggle for Hide extensions for known file types. (Windows XP shown). This is the first thing many people do when setting up a new Windows system. If you fit into this category, you have probably never seen this problem yourself, but you may still be able to use this knowledge to help others.