Image frames

Here's a nifty tip I've stumbled across during my continuous exploration of Autocad: IMAGEFRAME=2

I've skipped from 2005 straight to 2008, so I don't know if this is in '06 or '07, BUT ... it's a great tip in '08.

The IMAGEFRAME system variable, or IMF (my pgp shortcut), used to only have two settings: "On" and "Off". Well now it has three ... but they're numbered (0, 1, 2)

0 = Off

1 = On and plots the frame

and now the zinger:

2 = On and DOESN'T plot the frame

I LOVE this! Now I can easily move images if I need to without having to take the extra step(s) of finding out whether the frame is on, turning it on and then turning it off again so it doesn't plot (if you remember that step BEFORE plotting, that is).

So remember: IMAGEFRAME = 2, and just leave it alone.

Merry Christmas!
John

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!