Bring up layout tabs faster

This tip is especially helpful if you have large drawings with a lot of detail.

LAYOUTREGENCTL allows you to choose whether or not you regen when switching between tabs:

Controls the display behavior of how a layout acts when switching to it.

• 0 - Each time you switching to a layout tab, a regeneration occurs
• 1 - Model and the last layout tab is cached into memory
• 2 - Initial display of the tab is the only time that a regeneration occurs and any other time that the tab is activated it is read from cache

Customizing your pgp file

Let's say that this is what your AutoCAD screen looks like:


Here's mine:

As you can see, I only have a few toobars that I use, which gives me a lot more screen space. This is because I use my keyboard rather than toolbar buttons (a habit I suggest everyone adopts). But to make that habit more practical, I've customized my pgp file to get maximum efficiency with minimal effort.

For example, LAYWALK is now LAW. TXT2MTXT is now T2. JUSTIFYTEXT is now JT. etc, etc you get the point.

Why do this, you might ask? For one thing, it's easier to spell JUSTIFYTEXT wrong than JT. For another thing, it's a lot faster, and if you do this continually, your time will add up, to be sure.

Here's how:

Type in your desired shortkey in AutoCAD to make sure that key sequence is not in use.

Open up your pgp file.

Save as a backup (acad.pgp.old or some other easy to remember title)

*Scroll down to USER DEFINED COMMAND ALIASES (at bottom). This is important so you do not confuse your personal user commands with acad native commands. And, as the pgp file says, if there is already a shortkey for that command that you may have overlooked, this will take precedence, since the last command is found and used. Also, as you add more, it is easier to find the bottom than the middle :)
Now ... to the next step.

Type in your desired shortkey (JT,) be sure to add the comma.

Add a set of spaces, and then type *JUSTIFYTEXT (with the *). It should look like this:

There ya have it. You have now customized your pgp file.

Now, this is the step many people forget. In CAD, type REINIT. In the popup, select 'pgp file' and click OK.

You have now successfully integrated your new pgp file into AutoCAD.

Test it to see if it worked.

Enjoy the time you saved and buy yourself a pop :)

Autocad 2008

Oh, how I love Autocad 2008! It's such a great upgrade. I've just begun playing with it, but from the screencast I've seen from Lynn Allen (seen here), I can t wait to get crackin' on it.

The multileader tool and the annotative scaling feature are the most exciting I've seen. How many times have you decided to rescale a viewport, only to dread either doing the math and scaling all your text, dims (tho the dims are solved using this tip), hatching and any other items needing scaling (blocks), or pushing everything through to paperspace, rescaling to your standard, and then pushing it back into modelspace (spoken of in an upcoming blog entry - stay tuned!). Well, annotative scaling is a snap (with some setup).

Multileaders are ONE OBJECT! No longer is it 4 leaders qlattach'ed to mtext, but rather one single group of 4 leaders and mtext. I'm happy now :)

I'm sure there's plenty more (the automated sample blocks are cool, too), and once we install this on our workstations, I'll be playing -- errr, working -- with it a lot.

Have fun cadding!

Me and Kelly

This is me and my wife, Kelly. We've been married since July 2001 and she's my helper, my encourager and my best friend. She's the mother of my two children, Dustin (4) and Jayden (2). She also puts up with me while I spend all my free time playing AutoCAD and now publishing this blog.

She's so patient :)

New blog!

I've decided to start an Autodesk blog (yay!)

My passion (apart from God and family) is AutoCAD. I love Inventor, too, but I'm not proficient enough (yet) to provide tips~n~tricks for that one. I'm sure that will come soon enough.

As for now, I'll try to post a tip or two every once in a while when I either accidentally discover, develop out of necessity, or learn on another blog (the more places a tip is published, the better access the community overall will have to them, and well .. that's the whole point, isn't it?)

So to begin. What tip do you want to know about? hmmm ...

Dimensioning.

Here's a tip that is bound to help someone out there. Whenever you dimension (and I mean WHENEVER you dimension) use the setting "Scale dimensions to layout". This option is in the FIT tab of your dimstyle manager.



This technique allows you to dimension either through a single scale or several differently scaled viewports into modelspace or in paperspace without switching from this dim style to that one to whichever one each viewport called for.

If you've already dimensioned your drawing without clicking this box, no problem. Set it up and then click DIMUPDATE and highlight all the dims in whichever viewport(s).

Hope that helps!

Comments are always welcome :)