Some Cool Links
Since I believe many of you out there reading this article are Architects, I thought you should know about some movements in architecture that are gaining popularity in some circles. Cohousing is becoming an attractive alternative for housing here in the San Francisco Bay Area due to the rising costs of home ownership. If you're drafting biz is out here in the Bay Area, you might be interested in hearing about JVS. They retrain Russian emigrants who have many years of mechanical or architectural drafting experience, but lack the necessary CAD skills to get a job. They teach them AutoCAD or ProE and help place them into jobs. While we're still out here on the west coast, did you remember to register yet for Seybold? The exhibition is free, and you can get some software at great prices! Before you leave SF, check out MTC's job listings - they do post jobs for CAD people, including this one in SF
Viva la Dif
Have you ever sat there scratching your head because you can't figure out where the consultant changed your drawing? You know they made changes and you need to place those changes into your drawing. Unfortunately on a large project that task might be near impossible. Instead of needing a hair transplant you might want to try to Compare the drawings and let it find the differences instead.
Express If you haven't explored in your Express Tools lately, there are probably some commands you might have forgotten, or didn't notice were there. Mpedit allows you to pick multiple lines and arcs, turn them into polylines, and then lets you perform editing on them, all from the one command. TMT2MTXT is one of the commands I use all the time. It allows you to convert multiple lines of free floating text into Mtext to align them, edit it and spit out a nice clean looking paragraph of text. If you right click you can get a menu of options for how it converts the text. Once you are done you can also use the explode command to break it back into single lines of text, which are quicker to move around to move around. Did you know that when you move Mtext it is not only much slower than moving the exact same lines of Text plus Text you can see as you move it. Mtext is shown as simply a rectangular box during the move command, which will make it difficult to place correctly in your drawing. While on text, another Express tool is Tcase, which offers Sentence case, lowercase, UPPERCASE, Title and tOGGLE cASE as ways to modify your text. I've often sat there typing away, not realizing CAPS was off because I was looking at the redlines and not at the screen and had to retype in the whole note. Now I can enter the text and let AutoCAD adjust the text case instead of my spending the next 15 minutes retyping. Finally there is Burst. When I have to send a drawing out to a Mac user, they always want the drawing saved as r12, with everything exploded. Since my drawings often contain Attributes, exploding them will lose the information they contain. Instead, before I explode the entire drawing I use the Burst command to change the attributes into plain text, thereby saving the data that the consultant might need while still exploding it into a format their program can read.
Since I believe many of you out there reading this article are Architects, I thought you should know about some movements in architecture that are gaining popularity in some circles. Cohousing is becoming an attractive alternative for housing here in the San Francisco Bay Area due to the rising costs of home ownership. If you're drafting biz is out here in the Bay Area, you might be interested in hearing about JVS. They retrain Russian emigrants who have many years of mechanical or architectural drafting experience, but lack the necessary CAD skills to get a job. They teach them AutoCAD or ProE and help place them into jobs. While we're still out here on the west coast, did you remember to register yet for Seybold? The exhibition is free, and you can get some software at great prices! Before you leave SF, check out MTC's job listings - they do post jobs for CAD people, including this one in SF
Viva la Dif
Have you ever sat there scratching your head because you can't figure out where the consultant changed your drawing? You know they made changes and you need to place those changes into your drawing. Unfortunately on a large project that task might be near impossible. Instead of needing a hair transplant you might want to try to Compare the drawings and let it find the differences instead.
Express If you haven't explored in your Express Tools lately, there are probably some commands you might have forgotten, or didn't notice were there. Mpedit allows you to pick multiple lines and arcs, turn them into polylines, and then lets you perform editing on them, all from the one command. TMT2MTXT is one of the commands I use all the time. It allows you to convert multiple lines of free floating text into Mtext to align them, edit it and spit out a nice clean looking paragraph of text. If you right click you can get a menu of options for how it converts the text. Once you are done you can also use the explode command to break it back into single lines of text, which are quicker to move around to move around. Did you know that when you move Mtext it is not only much slower than moving the exact same lines of Text plus Text you can see as you move it. Mtext is shown as simply a rectangular box during the move command, which will make it difficult to place correctly in your drawing. While on text, another Express tool is Tcase, which offers Sentence case, lowercase, UPPERCASE, Title and tOGGLE cASE as ways to modify your text. I've often sat there typing away, not realizing CAPS was off because I was looking at the redlines and not at the screen and had to retype in the whole note. Now I can enter the text and let AutoCAD adjust the text case instead of my spending the next 15 minutes retyping. Finally there is Burst. When I have to send a drawing out to a Mac user, they always want the drawing saved as r12, with everything exploded. Since my drawings often contain Attributes, exploding them will lose the information they contain. Instead, before I explode the entire drawing I use the Burst command to change the attributes into plain text, thereby saving the data that the consultant might need while still exploding it into a format their program can read.
The copyright of the article Odds -n- ends in AutoCAD Design is owned by . Permission to republish Odds -n- ends in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
