AutoCAD 2015 and AutoCAD LT 2015 Bible
The most comprehensive AutoCAD book around!
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By Ellen Finkelstein The ELLIPSE command is the usual way to create an ellipse — or oval — but there’s a different way that may be more intuitive for you.
Here are the steps:
Draw a rectangle. Select the rectangle. Start the PEDIT command (polyline edit). Choose the Spline option.
Now, select the oval. This is what […]
By Ellen Finkelstein Sometimes you want a circle to hug a line perfectly. You could try to eyeball it, but there’s a better way–the tangent options of the CIRCLE command. There are two, TTR and TTT. The TTT option is something of a secret, because it doesn’t appear as an option on the Command line. I have no […]
By Ellen Finkelstein Spherical coordinates are a way of specifying coordinates in 3D. Mostly, you use them with the LINE command. They’re good for finding a coordinate that you might use in a solid or surface. (I cover cylindrical coordinates, which are similar, here.)
Spherical coordinates have the format distance<angle<angle. An example would be 6<40<20. The 3 parts […]
By Ellen Finkelstein Cylindrical coordinates are a way of specifying coordinates in 3D. Mostly, you use them with the LINE command. They’re good for finding a coordinate that you might use in a solid or surface.
Cylindrical coordinates have the format distance<angle,distance. An example would be 6<40,4. The 3 parts of the coordinate are as follows:
First distance: […]
By Ellen Finkelstein Do you create large drawings? If so, you probably spend a lot of time panning and zooming. Named views, which are pre-saved displays of part of your drawing, can help! A view can show any area of your drawing at any zoom value.
For the purpose of this tip, I’ll stick to views that you […]
By Ellen Finkelstein If you have a big drawing that you want to present to others, you’ll probably create views, but how about a menu to each view?
You can create hyperlinks to drawing views to easily navigate your drawing. Once you go to a view, you can use the View Previous feature to return to your menu […]
By Ellen Finkelstein Let’s say that you have an equilateral triangle and you want to make sure that it stays that way, even if you grip edit a corner. Because without any restrains, you can just wreck it, like this:
Use Parametrics to control the shape of objects as you edit them
AutoCAD’s geometric parametric feature lets […]
By Ellen Finkelstein In AutoCAD, you can create custom shapes using code that resides in a text file. You can insert a shape using the SHAPE command. Custom fonts (especially non-Roman ones) are often created using this shape feature.
Shapes vs blocks
Inserting a shape is similar to inserting a block, so let’s start with the difference between […]
By Ellen Finkelstein Let’s say you need to change the current layer, but aren’t sure which layer you want. But you know that you want the same layer as an existing object you’ve already drawn. That’s a pretty common scenario, right?
Enter Make Object’s Layer Current, also known as LAYMCUR.
This command has been around for a long […]
By Ellen Finkelstein Tool palettes can be a great place to store blocks, custom commands, and more. For example, in this post, I explain how to use tool palettes for blocks. And here I explain how to use tool palettes for user-defined hatches.
But what if you want to share them with others? You can share tool palettes […]
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