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AutoCAD 2015 and AutoCAD LT 2015 Bible

The most comprehensive AutoCAD book around!

Draw a circle centered in a rectangle

It’s common to need to place a circle in the middle of a rectangle, especially in mechanical drawings. It’s easy to do using object snap tracking.

Object snap tracking tracks the coordinates on object snaps and for this task, you need to track the midpoint of the rectangle’s sides. Here are the steps:

Make sure […]

Create a circle with a width

There are various reasons that you might need to create a circular object with a specific width, such as matching cable widths, or showing cross sections. I’ve come up with 4 ways to go about this. The right one for you will depend on your needs.

Fit a polygon

An excellent method uses the POLYGON […]

Draw a donut (yum!) in AutoCAD

A donut looks like a wide circle with a hole in it but is actually made up of 2 semi-circle polylines. You can use donuts for electronic schematics, as trees or bushes, or as symbols.

Here are the steps to create a donut:

Choose Home tab and expand the Draw panel to find the DONUT […]

Stretch a circle with grips and specify the radius or change in radius

You can easily stretch a circle with grips. To specify the new radius, just enter it on the command line (or in the Dynamic Input tooltip). But suppose the information you have is the difference between the two radii?

For example, let’s say that your circle’s radius is 1.825 and you know that you have […]

Close an arc to make a circle or ellipse; connect splines

Starting with AutoCAD 2006, you can use the JOIN command to join objects that are colinear, meaning that they’re along the same line. Usually, you use JOIN to join lines or polylines. For example, you may have broken a line and now you need it whole again. The command fills in gaps, if necessary.

You […]

Find coordinates

Some coordinates are easy to find. For example, to find the endpoint of a line, you just use the Endpoint object snap.

But others are more elusive.

For example, recently someone asked me, “I would like to ask if there is a simple way to select a center of a rectangle.”

My answer was: If […]