The H-Factor

In our last episode I told you how to make your own tool palettes. Here’s how you can do more with them.

You can control a number of things about how your block gets inserted from a tool palette. Right click on your block and pick Properties. This will give you the properties you can control. Scale, Rotation and Prompt for Rotation are found in the Insert section. In the General section you will find options like Color, Layer and Linetype to set specific for those (otherwise they adopt the current layer and color settings).

Create as many palettes as you like. Next I’ll show you how to group them and Export them to some one else’s machine

A quickee – A customer just had a problem where he clicks on an object to move it and types in 0,0 as its destination and the block doesn’t go anywhere. After some digging we found that the behavior seemed like he was typing in @0,0, indeed he saw this echoed at the command prompt even though he didn’t type in an @ sign. He then said he was using Dynamic Input and it worked properly when DI was turned off. Hmmmm. So I went hunting in the SETVARs and found a few pretenders until I hit upon this one:

Controls whether pointer input uses relative or absolute format
for coordinates.

Weird! He set it to 1 and it worked as he expected, but this is contrary to the way AutoCAD sets it by default. I have no idea why it defaults to 0

A long time customer called today and he wanted to create pulldown menus to insert a bunch of block details that the guys on the alarm side of the business use. I suggested he use tool palettes instead because they are much easier to ‘program’ and for his application they fit the bill perfectly.

To make your own tool palettes:

1. Press CTRL+3 to open the tool palette (if not already open)
2. Right click on the tool palette and pick New Palette. Give it a name you like, i.e. My Blocks
3. Now open up the Design Center using CTRL+2
4. Navigate to the folder where you have the blocks you want added to the palette
5. Select a block and drag it to your palette and let go

That’s it! When you want to insert a block just drag it off the palette into your drawing or click on it.

Tomorrow I’ll talk more about controlling the insertion of block from the palette and how to save the palettes and transfer them to another machine.

We’ve all done it – either permanently erased a drawing we were working on or worse – saved over a drawing we wanted to keep. How to get the drawing back? Restore the backup you made of the drawing. No, I’m not being sarcastic here – every night you should copy the drawing to a tape drive, cd or a server location so you have a copy to restore if necessary.

If you don’t have that, you can try to restore the automatic copy AutoCAD makes. But first you have to find it. It is stored in a location that is specified in your AutoCAD OPTIONS dialog:

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1. Open up OPTIONS and pick the File tab. Navigate down to Automatic Save File Location and pick the + there. This lists the folder in which your automatically saved files go. Note that it uses the old DOS scrunchy abbreviations for the folder names.

2. Open Explorer (or whatever you use to navigate through your files) and located the folder specified in the above location.

3. Find your drawing. Note that it will be your original drawing name followed by the extension .sv$ instead of .dwg. Rename the drawing to something entirely new and change the extension to be .dwg. Copy this newly named file to your usual drawing file folder and open it up to see if it is what you expect.

You can also try the AutoCAD DRAWINGRECOVERY command. It will locate most of these backup files for you.

PS – AutoCAD also saves temporary files in case you crash in the middle of a drawing session, but these get erased as soon as you successfully open AutoCAD the next time, so they are pretty useless as far as this goes.

I am often asked if you can run AutoCAD on a home machine as well as on an office machine. The answer is yes – there are two ways to do this.

The first is to be on AutoCAD subscription. This will allow you that second registration on your home computer.

The second is to use the Portable License Utility found by picking Start, Programs, Autodesk, [Autodesk Product Name], Portable License Utility. I mentioned this in an earlier post

Some of you have noticed that our HydraCAD shortcuts have a -p Hydratec or -p SMaRTools in the Target field of the desktop Shortcut and have asked what those mean. Others have asked how to call up a Profile that a user has created by using the desktop Shortcuts. Here you go:

1. Set up AutoCAD/HydraCAD the way you want it with respect to Support File Search Paths, Toolbars, etc.
2. In the AutoCAD Options pick the Profiles tab and pick Export
3. Give the Profile a name that makes sense to you, i.e MyProfile or soemthing
4. Leave AutoCAD and go to the Desktop
5. Right-click on the Shortcut for AutoCAD/HydraCAD and pick Properties
6. In the Target field go to the very end and after the acad.exe" add a space then -p MyProfile and pick OK

This will start AutoCAD/HydraCAD with your custom profile

PS – If you want to reset AutoCAD to its defaults (i.e. without HydraCAD’s modifications) then pick the Reset button on the Profiles tab. Export this profile if you want

By now most of you are aware of three tools for eliminating z-coordinates from a drawing:

1. Eliminate Z-Coordinates Phase 1
2. Eliminate Z-Coordinates Phase 2

Both from our HcadTool->Tools pulldown menu and…

3. Flatten – the AutoCAD Express Tools command

If neither of these gives you the results you want then try the following, written by Josh here at the ‘tec:

A method to remove z coordinates from an architects drawing
is to create DWFs and Xref them into the drawing. The process to do so follows:

Note: These steps will walk you through keeping each layer
unique and there for be able to treat them as separate layers in your drawing.
If you wish to have all the architects layers merged to a single layer then skip to Option 2. 

1. Open the architect’s drawing and choose the layer you want as the current layer.
2. Turn off all layers (this should leave only the layer you selected on)
3. Select Print and choose the DWF writer as your plotter and DWF virtual pens as your pen style.
4. When prompted for a file name use a name that is easily recognizable, i.e. Arch_Walls or Mech_Ducts
5. Repeat the above processes until you have all the layers you will want for your sprinkler drawing.
6. Open a new drawing using a HydraCAD template.
7. Create a layer for each DWF you created using a name that is easily recognizable. You may want to name the layer same as the DWF.
8. Repeat until you have a layer for each DWF you created. This is needed so that you can turn individual DWFs off and on.
9. Through the Xref command load the DWFs into your drawing making sure that the layer you want them in is the current layer. Use a common insertion point and scale.
10. Before printing the job you will need to select the DWF and under properties change it to Monochrome – Yes. Not doing this will cause the plot to print in color. 

Option 2

1. Open the architect’s drawing and turn off any layers you do not want
2. Select Print and choose the DWF writer as your plotter and DWF virtual pens as your pen style.
3. When prompted for a file name use a name that is easily recognizable, i.e. Arch or Mech
4. Open a new drawing using a HydraCAD template.
5. Create a layer for the DWF you created using a name that is easily recognizable. You may want to name the layer same as the DWF.
6. Through the Xref command load the DWFs into your drawing making sure that the layer you want them in is the current layer. Use a common insertion point and scale.
7. Before printing the job you will need to select the DWF and under properties change it to Monochrome – Yes. Not doing this will cause the plot to print in color.

Now all of the layers will be in your new drawing but
without any Z coordinates. You can still use all of the typical Osnap commands: End, Midpoint, Perpendicular….