Sometimes it’s really helpful to have a few properties available for review and editing, but the Properties palette can take up a lot of precious screen area.
The Quick Properties Palette is a good alternative, but often the properties you want to see or edit aren’t included. It’s very easy to customize. In fact, it’s so easy, you can quickly do it for specific tasks.
For example, suppose you wanted to see Lineweight, Linetype, Linetype scale and Linetype generation whenever polylines are selected, rather than Color, Layer or Global width.
First, if it is not already, activate Quick Properties on the status bar, so that the palette displays whenever an object is selected.
Next, select a polyline.
Then, on the Quick Properties Palette, click the Options icon, (it’s below the “X” to close the palette, near the top of the right-hand side), and from the menu select Customize.
This launches the CUI dialog box, with the Quick Properties Palette and the Polyline Object options displayed, and ready for customizing.
Caution: The CUI dialog box controls nearly every aspect of AutoCAD’s interface.
Be very careful whenever you edit anything in this dialog box.
In the General section, along the right-hand column, disable the options to display Color and Layer in the Quick Properties Palette. Next, enable the options to display Linetype, Linetype scale and Lineweight.
In the Geometry section, disable the option to display Global width.
In the Misc. section, enable the option to display Linetype generation.
Click the Apply button, then click the OK button.
That’s it, from now on, when the Quick Properties Palette is displayed for Polyline objects, you will see, and be able to edit the properties you enabled.
If you want to see all of the properties you selected, disable the Auto-Collapse option.
You can use this method to customize the way AutoCAD displays the properties for any type of object, making this tool far more useful than the default settings alone.
