AutoCAD

The words accuracy and precision are tossed around a lot in the CAD, mapping and engineering fields, and they are often thought of as having the same meaning. It is important to know the difference, and it’s even more important to verify whether data you are getting from someone else is accurate, precise, or both, […]

I’ve been using AutoCAD to create maps since the mid-1980s, and I had to develop a lot of kludges in the early days to get what I envisioned to come out of the plotter.  Significant improvements to AutoCAD over the years have made many of those work-around tricks obsolete, but there are still a few

A new feature of AutoCAD 2004 is the ability to password protect drawings.  This is a feature that some users have asked for for a long time, but it may fall into the category of “Be careful what you ask for because you just might get it”.  The idea at first might sound great, and

Object selected is not a polyline Do you want to turn it into one? <Y> This is a prompt that we have all seen thousands of times.  It shows up every time that you select an object with the PEDIT command that is not a polyline.  Personally, I have always wondered why AutoCAD is asking

If you have ever tried to open a drawing only to find that it is already open so that your only option is to open a read-only copy then this tip is for you. Starting in AutoCAD 2004 the WHOHAS option was enabled by default. You may have noticed .dwl files being created in the

Did you know that you can use any of the standard AutoCAD selection options when selecting objects during the FILLET command? Although AutoCAD does not automatically let you select objects by using the Window and Crossing Window selection sets as it does in other commands. You can still use any AutoCAD graphical selection technique if

This is something that has happened to all of us.  You drag a toolbar over to the edge of your screen with the intention of docking it and instead it disappears.  It seems as though your toolbar has fallen off the edge of the earth, or at least the edge of your monitor, and you

Over the years there have been several different options for batch plotting.  The Publish command has combined the more traditional batch plotting of several drawings or layouts to a plotter with the option of plotting them all to a single DWF file.  But what if you still need to create plot files (PLT files)?  Well

The BHATCH (Boundary Hatch) command has undergone several improvements in AutoCAD 2005 that you may not be aware of.  These changes don’t get the press and the space in most reviews that some of the higher profile features like Sheet Sets, Tables, and Fields, but they can still save you significant amounts of time.  Most

A great new feature of AutoCAD 2004 is the Tool Palette.  One of the things that it lets you do is easily create a symbol library where you can select the desired block, with predefined properties such as Layer and Color, from the Tool Palette and insert it by dragging and dropping it into the