AutoCAD Tips & Tutorials

AutoCAD 2008 is here!

AutoCAD 2008, the latest version of AutoCAD, was sent out in March. As I've done for several years, I describe the new features so you can see if they'll be helpful to you. This year, the emphasis is solidly in the 2D arena.

Dashboard

The Dashboard, introduced in 2007 for the 3D environment, has been expanded to provide lots of 2D tools. In fact, the default workspace doesn't even show the Draw and Modify toolbars. That's a little unnerving, and you may want to display them again, but give the Dashboard a try. It's very useful for settings. Each section is called a control panel. Right-click the Dashboard and choose Control Panel to see a menu of all of them and choose the ones you want to see (or don't want to see). You can also customize the Dashboard using the CUI command. Here you see the default workspace with the Dashboard.

The new Dashboard tools go along with a new workspace, 2D Drafting & Annotation, which is the new default.

Conclusion: I use the Dashboard a lot. It doesn't work well to replace the Draw or Modify toolbars or drop-down lists that need to be horizontal, such as the Layer Control drop-down (especially if your layer names are long). But for almost everything else, it's great. If you customize it, you should be able to make it almost perfect.

Annotation objects

Do you plot objects in multiple viewports at more than one scale? Do those objects contain text, dimensions, or other objects that you want to remain the same size throughout those viewports? If so, then annotation objects are for you. Annotation objects can include single- and multi-line text, dimensions, tolerances, leaders, the new multileaders, hatches, blocks, and attributes.

First, you give the object an annotative property. You either do that when you're creating the object (single-line text, tolerances, leaders, hatches, blocks, and attributes) or when you're creating a style for that object (multi-line text, dimensions, and multileaders). Then you assign each object one or more annotation scales. Finally, you create viewports at those annotation scales and the objects scale inversely, so they remain the size you specified.

Here you see two viewports at different scales. Notice how the dimension and leader text remains the same size.

View Heidi Hewett's excellent video on annotation objects.

Conclusion: This feature has a bit of a learning curve, but is very powerful. Many people have been adding dimensions and text in paper space, but that doesn't work for hatches or blocks.

Layers

If you sometimes want to emphasize an object in one viewport by changing its color, you can now do so easily using layer overrides. When you open the Layer Properties Manager from model space in a layout, the dialog box includes 4 new columns where you can set color, linetype, lineweight, and plot style for the active viewport.

There are several other layer-related changes. Some of them are:

• In the Layer Properties Manager, you can reorder the columns by dragging them, more easily create a layer frozen in all viewports, among other improvement.
• The new SETBYLAYER command changes object properties to ByLayer.
• The LAYISO command, which isolates layers (freezes all but one) lets you lock and fade the other layers, rather than just hide them.
• You can access the Layer States Manager directly, without going through the Layer Properties Manager.
• The Dashboard has a new Layers control panel with many layer settings.
• To maintain standards, you can set up notification whenever new layers are added to the drawing. You can do this just for xrefs or for all layers and can specify when AutoCAD looks for "unreconciled" layers (such as before plotting).

Conclusion: Working with layers is easier. Customizing individual viewport views is now a simple task. Previously, you would have created a plot style to do this, or multiple layers to freeze and thaw in each viewport.

Text

A new Paragraph dialog box lest you specify tabs, indents, alignment, spacing, line spacing and columns. You can create columned text. Spell checking doesn't require a misspelled or selected word and you have more control over where and what you check.

Conclusion: Columns are a great new addition.

Tables and Data

You can directly link to Microsoft Excel spreadsheet data. The data in the AutoCAD table changes when the Excel spreadsheet changes and vice versa.

You can extract all sorts of object data from any object. They categories of data you can extract are geometric, file-related, 3D, and property (color, layer, etc.). This is not only a table feature, because you can save the data to an external file (XLS, CSV, MDB, or TXT).

You can save cell styles and other formatting for borders and margins is more flexible. You can auto-fill incremental data like you can in Excel. You can wrap tables across multiple columnar sections to fit them into tight spaces.

Conclusion: The new data extraction and external linking features are very powerful. Much easier than the external database feature, if your data is in Excel.

Dimensions

You can break dimension or extension lines where they cross objects; if you move those other objects, the dimension adjusts accordingly. You can evenly space dimensions. You can dimension an arc past its endpoints. You can place the text for angular dimensions outside the angle. A new DIMJOGLINE command creates a job for linear dimensions when your sheet is too small to display the true length. Three's a new Inspection dimension that specifies quality requirements.

New multi-leaders that have more than one arrow (a requested item for a long time) are now a reality. You can create multi-leader styles to control them. You have lots of options; for example, you can place a circle, triangle, or box block at the end and use an attribute to create numbered balloon leaders.

Blocks & References

Block attributes can have multiple lines of text and you can use a simplified Mtext Editor to format them.

You can attach V8 DGN (Microstation) drawings. You can create inverse clips of xrefs or blocks (showing everything outside an area as opposed to everything inside an area). You can also import DGN files and export to DGN format.

3D

Yes, there are a few new 3D features. You can specify lights using real-world parameters, such as candela, lumen, or lux; also you can choose light colors such as fluorescent, incandescent, and more. You can do some fine-tuning to get more realistic results with texture maps.

Utilities

The new RECOVERALL command lets you use the Recover feature to select not only a corrupted drawing but its xrefs.

The New InfoCenter incorporates the Communication Center. It includes RSS feeds (add my feed!) and a handy search box for Help.

                                  Home  |  AutoCAD  |  PowerPoint  | E-Store | About  | Links | Contact | Site Map
Copyright Ellen Finkelstein, Inc.