now a new version of AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT means that there are several little enhancements that have taken place these are small changes that will make existing tools better even if it’s just slightly but you get enough of these things and altogether they’re almost like one big giant feature all on their own
one nice thing is that you can now draw arcs in either direction by pressing the control key to switch directions let me show you I’ve been a for the art command pick my center point.
pick my start point and it will draw in this direction as you can see that it’s starting at my start point that little bit that’s in between my crosshair and that first point is not getting drawn if that’s the part that I want drawn that short little empty speck there I just press and hold the
in I want to fill it these two ends closed before AutoCAD 2014 and AutoCAD LT 2014 I couldn’t do that
it wouldn’t fill it in and close in on itself I could fill up one of these corners no problem but let’s say I’m going to fill it and make a radius of two I can click here now and they give me a little preview you can see I can now fill it a polyline on itself it’s the same thing now with a chamfer the chamfer can do that as well and that’s a really great thing another thing that you can do is use the convert P STL files that’s a long system variable and it’s a command but it lets users convert the current drawing to either a named or color dependent plot style that’s just a different way of managing your layers and line types and layer colors and line thicknesses when they print if you’re going to use a CTB file or an STD file this is just something that will do that change for you on the fly another thing that you can do in AutoCAD 2014 is to have spaces in style names you couldn’t have that before so if you go to your annotate tab and you go to dimension Styles click here to open it up for if we were going to make a new one couldn’t put spaces in it before but now you can it’s not a huge thing but it’s one of those little tweaks that make the program just a little bit better now the default behavior for inserting blocks with attributes is going to stay in the dialog box the attd ia setting is set to 1 so just remember that if you’re using attribute dialog boxes what that means is that when you insert a block and it has attributes and typically that’ll be with like a title block the window will open up when you insert it every time by default and allow you to insert that text now of course you can turn that off if you like another thing that’s been changed as single line text that’s been changed to maintain the last
justification setting until it’s changed so find one to type in single line text I’m going to justify it left put it in here
bringing the type in text now when I go to put this in it kept the same
justification that I had before so if I try to do D text again
and I go to justify its defaulting to left because that’s what I used last time
in my height and now my rotation and I can just type in whatever I need usually when you’re making text you’re doing it the same way over and over again until you need it to be different that’s just a little time-saver another nice little thing is the dim continue mode system variable that means when you’re
dimensioning something and you want to continue that dimension so let’s say here I have a dimension
and I’m going to click here if I want to continue I can come up here to my continue and it comes here by default and sets out my dimensions but let’s say I have a different style we’re going to click the annotate of one and I have a dimension
here we’re going to put in
now regardless of what’s set as being current say I’m having my standard style be current if I go to click continue and if I want to select press s say I want to pick this dimension
now what’s nice about it is that it will automatically adopt the dimension style that you’re continuing even though it’s not the current now another thing is the ribbon hatch tool it will maintain the previously used method of selecting a hatch by either picking an internal point or selecting objects so whatever you did last that’s what it’s going to do so one last thing in the command line the undo option has been added to it so if I start a command like line and I perform one instance of it and a weight I picked the wrong spot normally I would just cancel out and just start the command all over again
pick my point nope that’s the wrong point again I can come down here and click undo it doesn’t cancel out my command they don’t have to completely start over I can click the first point and then the second point oops that’s the wrong second point well I can just hit you for undo or I can click down in here before I couldn’t do that so it makes it a little bit easier to undo some things those are a lot of the little things that have been put into this new version of AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT that make the experience a little bit better these are very small things but all the small things together really add up
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