The AutoCAD Join party, that is. I confess I did not know this command existed until a customer in NC pointed it out last week. The JOIN command is found on the Modify toolbar between Break and Chamfer. It will join a line, polyline, arc, elliptical arc, spline, or helix. The first three are the…

The numbers menu and the tablet menu (digitizer) were intentionally removed in V45 due to the lack of acceptance by customers and the nature of the new menu structure provided by AutoCAD 2007 and newer. As we keep adding new features, occasionally we need to remove some to keep the program from becoming too large…

Some people don’t like seeing the commands written out near their crosshairs. Personally, I love it because I don’t have to look down at the command line. But…. To turn off the crosshair command prompt, right-click on the DYN (Dynamic Input) button and pick Settings. Then turn off the Show Command Prompting… If you lose…

To add your own Workspace – Arrange the screen the way you want it (command line, scroll bars, ribbons, whatever) and pick Save Current As: from the Workspace toolbar. To make your Workspace load upon opening a drawing – Pick Customize from the Workspace toolbar and then right click on your preferred Workspace and pick…

We have long been able to convert drawings that are made in our competitors software into ours. The conversion are pretty good (if I say so myself), but all have some limitation due to the way each package creates objects. As a rule – this is the procedure to follow: 1. Start a new drawing using…

HydraCAD has a command called Change item Colors. It is found right after Pretty Pipes on the Cleanup toolbar. What does it do? It lets you assign colors to different parts of your drawing. It is run after you run Pretty Pipes, hence it’s location on that toolbar. You can assign three additional colors to…

While I was training a customer in New Castle, PA last week a question came up that I thought had long been answered. By the mere fact it was asked showed how wrong I was. They had trouble shipping their drawings to their engineers because the engineers could not see our 1/2 and 1/4 symbols.…

Does anyone have any experience with any of the PDF to DWG converters out there? I have not been able to find any reviews of the half dozen or so converters that came up in a Google search. The ones I have found are: AutoDWGAnyDWGaidecadpdf2cad These are all about $180. Sounds like a little cartel…

A customer emailed today with the following question: "We do a lot of work in the field, doing lots of measuring and drawing/checking the buildings where we are working.  I would like to be able to enter the data we generate directly instead of copying to paper and then copying from there into AutoCAD back…

This one came via a customer for subscribes to Steve Johnson’s blog Cad Nauseam From Steve Johnson, blog nauseam, April 10, 2008. "If you’ve noticed some normal drafting operations are much slower in AutoCAD 2009 than in earlier releases, try turning off the new Layer Palette and see if the problem goes away. For example,…