question about apostraphe prefix 'trick'

[ammobake]

Today, I was doing some training at work and was reading a PDF from 2013 about terrain modeling methods in civil3d but my question isn't really civil3d related - more of a general autocad question.

Link here: https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.njspls.org/resource/resmgr/Docs/TerrainModelingContouringAna.pdf

 

On page 13 it goes into explaining "an old AutoCAD trick - a transparent command'.

It sais...

 

At the Select objects: prompt, type 'LA and press Enter; the Layer Properties Manager appears inside, and without interrupting, the AutoCAD selection! In the Layer Properties Manager, turn off all layers except the spot elevations - R-SPOT ELEVATION in this case. Press OK to exit the Layer Properties Manager, returning to the Select objects: prompt.

Select all of the spot elevations with a Window or Crossing selection, but do not hit Enter to close the selection.

 

AutoCAD is still at the Select objects: prompt; again type 'LA and press Enter to redisplay the Layer Properties Manager. Turn the layers back on (or restore a layer snapshot to be really tricky), and again press OK to exit the Layer Properties Manager and return to the Select objects: prompt.

At this point, the selection and layer hocus-pocus are done; press Enter to end the selection, and Civil 3D builds the surface.

 

This got me very curious about whether or not this is still applicable in recent versions of AutoCAD and Civil3D.

But after messing around with this it appears this trick may be obsolete now?

I really couldn't get any of the options to work properly without deselecting the selection set.  I may just be doing it wrong.

 

A coworker told me they use an 'SO command to do station offsets because it's the only way they can do them for some reason.

 

Any thoughts on this?

 

ChriS

[BIGAL]

Transparent commands can be defuns. Yes they still work.

 

eg Line pickpoint '47 picknext etc osnaps changed mid command m2p comes to mind.

(defun c:47 () (setvar 'osmode 47)))

 

Also look at 'cal eg circle 'cal (rad/2.) see what happens. cal has lots of functions look up help.

Edited July 19, 2019 by BIGAL

[SLW210]

They work fine here.