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Michael’s Corner - June 2013

The Big Three: Layers, Text, & Blocks

This month Michael Beall is on tour. "Nothing new there", I hear you say. But, in addition to his official NeoCon seminar in Chicago, he will be presenting his AutoCAD Toolbelt seminar on June 12th. If you happen to be in Chicago on that day, pop along and say "hi".

In this month's Corner, Michael looks at some cool features of the AutoCAD drawing's fundamental components, namely, Layers, Text and Blocks, including an introduction to AutoCAD 2014's new Merge Layers tool.

So, check out all the juicy goodness of this month's Corner and don't forget we have an archive of over 10 years of Corners for you to browse at your leisure.

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Tip of the Day

Auto-repeating Commands

Sometimes you need to repeat a command lots of times and it can be a bit tedious doing the usual Right-Click and Repeat… or even using the Enter () key on the keyboard. It would be really useful if you could just keep a command auto-repeating until you hit the Escape (Esc) key. Well, you can. All you need to do is make a small change to the CUI.

For example, say you want to draw lots of circles and have the circle command auto-repeat so that you can just pick center, radius, center, radius etc. Here's what you do:

1. Select ViewToolbars… from the pull-down menu to display the CUI dialogue box.
2. In the "Customizations in All CUI Files" section, click on "Toolbars" and then "Draw" to reveal the Draw commands, and then click "Circle".
3. The Properties area now changes to display the Circle button properties and under the "Macro" heading, you will see the macro used to start the Circle command. By default, this macro is: ^C^C_circle. To cause the Circle command to auto-repeat, simply add a "*" before the existing macro. Once edited, your macro should look like this: *^C^C_circle.
4. Now click the "OK" button to save and return to the drawing.

Try the circle command and see what happens.

This technique can be used with most commands. For example, if you are doing a lot of dimensioning, you could auto-repeat the Linear Dimension command so that you can draw all your dimensions without breaking stride.

Today's tip is by fuccaro

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