Top 20 AutoCAD Customizations – Part Two: Tuesday Tips With Frank

[The AutoCAD Blog]

Let’s get back to it with the second installment of the Top 20 AutoCAD customizations! If you missed it, be sure to check out part one with the first 10. Now, let’s take a look at numbers 11-20. And, again, we’ll list these in no particular order.

11. Command Line Docking

When it comes to how you want to view your Command Line, much like the old hamburger ad campaign stated, you can have it your way.

Using a left click press and hold on the left edge of default Command Line display, feel free to pull it off the bottom edge of the drawing editor. Make it shorter or larger by dragging an edge. If you want to put it back at the bottom, simply drag it back. When you get close enough, it will snap back into place for you.

Maybe you’re like me and prefer the old school “in-line” display. This time, when you drag the Command Line, move it below the bottom edge, and it will be incorporated into the interface, now in its full view state.

Either view will dock on any edge, so set it up how it works best for you. Or others! By that I mean that many of us who use a projected image of AutoCAD when teaching a class will place the Command Line at the top, where it can be seen easier by the students.

12. Status Bar Contents

The Status Bar doesn’t display everything by default. Click on the customization icon in the lower right. Some people like to call this icon “the hamburger” (uh oh, do I feel a theme building or would that be considered cheesy?)

If an entry doesn’t have a check mark, it is not currently displayed. Simply click on it to add it to the Status Bar. Conversely, there may be items that you don’t use. Do you never have the need to draw in Isometric mode? Save some space for something else by unchecking it here.

13. Ribbon Panel Options

Similar to the Status Bar, your Ribbon doesn’t show everything by default. To manage your Tabs and Panels, right-click anywhere on the Ribbon to display two tools which display the available Tabs or Panels, and their visibility status. Much like the Status Bar, turn them on or off as needed.

Perhaps there’s a tool that you’ll need to access often, but your workflow requires you to change tabs often, adding an extra and unnecessary step of changing tabs constantly. You can do a left-click press and hold on any black spot of a Panel, and drag it off the Ribbon and let it “float” elsewhere.

When you’re done, you can click on the small icon in the upper right corner of the floating panel to return it to the position it was in on the Ribbon prior to floating it.

14. Maximize Viewport

Do you ever need to work within a Paper Space viewport, but it’s rather small and your space is limited? You can maximize a viewport to fill the entire drawing editor. Simply double click on any edge of the desired viewport, and just like that, it expands to full view.

Your visual clue is the large blue border that AutoCAD will display around the editor. Time to return to normal? Just double-click anywhere on the blue border.

15. Model Space Viewports

Viewports aren’t just for Paper Space. This customization is extremely useful if you ever work in 3D. From the View tab of the Ribbon, expand the Viewport Configuration tool in the Model Viewports panel. Select from eleven preset layouts.

Unlike Paper Space viewports, they are always tiled in Model Space. Just single click inside of any viewport to activate it. In the configuration shown below, it might be used to set one to be a top view, another a front view and another would be a side view.

When you need to get back to normal, click on the Single option of the configuration pulldown, and the currently active viewport will display normally.

16. Startup Switches

Customizing AutoCAD can be done outside of the interface as well. Did you know there are a number of things that you can have AutoCAD do when you double click on its desktop icon? They’re Command Line Switches, and (properly) adding them to the program’s icon can greatly increase your efficiency.

You can tell AutoCAD to use a particular profile when it starts. You can specify a Sheet Set or a Template to start with. Maybe you want to run a particular Script or not display the splash screen — you can do that, too!

Explore all of the available switches by clicking on this link to the reference table.

17. WYSIWYG

In most modern graphics programs, you work in a What You See Is What You Get, or WYSIWYG environment. AutoCAD, as you know, displays in colors, then translates those colors or objects into the desired printed form. We use the Preview function to see what it will look like.

But you can have AutoCAD display as WYSIWIG, and it’s as easy as clicking a single check box. From the pen assignments panel in the Page Setup dialog box, check Display Plot Styles.

Having set this, you can see in our sample drawing below, the CTB/STB style of color display, verses the WYSIWYG style. I know of some firms that set an extra layout tab to display this way all the time.

18. Tool Palettes From Design Center

Ah, we’ve come to the CAD Manager’s best friend. Tool palettes are an incredible design aid, and using them is fast and easy, as long as they’re already set up and ready to go.

This is where the AutoCAD Design Center comes in. Do you need to create a tool palette of hundreds of blocks? Fire it up, navigate to either the folder or file that contains your blocks, right-click and tell it to create a tool palette. Easy peasy. Read all about it in the link below.

For all my CAD Manager readers out there, I’m sorry for giving away one of our behind the curtain secrets.

19. View Transitions

The AutoCAD drawing editor has improved its graphics in recent years. One of those improvements is the default ability to see the transition from one fiew to the next. You know, you zoom into an area, and you see the graphics zoom to, or transition to the new view. These are called Zoom Transitions and are controlled by a system variable called VTENABLE.

To speed things up, you can turn this feature off by setting that varialbe to zero. Below are two animations. The top one shows the default transition settings, and the bottom one performs the same zoom with it turned off.

VTENABLE set to its default of 3 VTENABLE set to zero (off)

20. Options Dialog

Oh, there’s so much more. But I’m at 20, so it’s time to move on for me. But you can find all kinds of other ways to customize AutoCAD from the Options dialog.

Click on the Display tab, and you’ll find that four of the six panels directly affect how you view and interface with AutoCAD. Do you like to have scroll bars displayed, and do you prefer for your crosshairs to be full screen? You can find those options and more here.

That’s All Folks

Hopefully between this blog and the last, you’ve found a little nugget or two that will make your AutoCAD sessions work a bit more like you do.

To paraphrase an early AutoCAD influencer, until next time “keep on customizing.”

More Tuesday Tips

Check out our whole Tuesday Tips series for ideas on how to make AutoCAD work for you. 

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