Cadalyst Magazine

I last reported on the state of Cadalyst last February, just prior to the move to their new publisher, Longitude Media, LLC.

Cadalyst.com and most other electronic forms of publication remained unchanged, however the future of the printed magazine was undetermined.

Fast forward to Autodesk University, December 2009, Cadalyst successfully "re-launches" the print version. Learn more about the new Cadalyst magazine here.

Return of Hot Tip Harry

Starting with the return of the print version, I have agreed to work with Cadalyst to perform the duties of "Hot Tip Harry". Currently, I will be working with the editors to compile and publish your tips in the Hot Tip Harry column. I will also be moderating the Hot Tip Harry CAD forum at Cadalyst.com Feel free to drop by the forums and ask a question, answer a question, or just say hello.

If you want to submit a tip for Hot Tip Harry or for the CadTips site at Cadalyst, please visit this page for the submission guidelines and a link. You can also submit your code to harry@cadalyst.com

On the heels of the poll posted earlier this week, the dates and locations for the 2010 Augi Cad Camps have been announced. So far, 29 locations are on the schedule.

http://www.augicadcamp.com

Missing from the list are a couple of the largest markets in the United States, Miami and Houston. Also, there is a large populated area with no coverage along the Gulf Coast in an area roughly bounded by South Texas, Shreveport, Little Rock, Memphis, Birmingham, and Tallahassee. (Honolulu not shown on the map below, it is included on the full map)

View 2010 Augi Cad Camp Locations in a larger map

If you have not already, add your response to the poll in the upper left corner. Thanks.

It's not uncommon for someone, even these days in the era of the Ribbon, to want to turn on a toolbar. Many people know that you can right click in the toolbar area, and each loaded menugroup will be listed, then you can choose the appropriate toolbar to display.

But what if you don't have any toolbars showing at all? Then there is not a suitable location in which to right click.

Here is what you do, run the -TOOLBAR command. Note the leading hyphen, which calls the command line version of this command. The first prompt asks for the toolbar name. Enter a toolbar name such as "MODIFY". Then it will ask you how you want to display the toolbar. Press "F" for float. It will then ask you for coordinates at which to place the toolbar. You can accept the defaults (0,0) and the toolbar will appear in the upper left corner of your primary monitor. If you want to specify a certain location, be aware that the values increase as you move left and down. So if you specify a location of 300,500, the toolbar will be placed 300 pixels to the left and 500 pixels below the upper left corner of your primary monitor. The last prompt it asks you is how many rows for the toolbar.

Of course you could script this using a menu macro or lisp routine. If you watch the prompts on the -TOOLBAR command, you'll see that you can hide toolbars also, so it's possible to setup some shortcuts to show and hide various toolbars - which should be quicker than switching workspaces.

Here is one way to generate a list of polyline vertices using lisp. This function requires one argument, a polyline entity. The polyline can be the old style POLYLINE entity (2D or 3D), or it can be an LWPOLYLINE entity.

(defun getcoords (ent)
  (vlax-safearray->list
    (vlax-variant-value
      (vlax-get-property
	(vlax-ename->vla-object ent)
	"Coordinates"
      )
    )
  )
)

I have been working with the Civil 3D 2010 API in visual lisp recently, and I thought I would share an example of working with an alignment object. This example has plenty of comments, but basically it shows you how to find a point near the alignment based on a station and offset. Then it does the opposite and shows you how to determine the station and offset, given a point. For clarity, I have left out most of the error checking.

Regarding yesterday's post....what I failed to cover with any detail was the fact that the example code posted in the CADTutor forum post was strictly for a closed area defined by four lines. Of course that isn't the only area you may need to hatch. Today, I needed to adapt this code to hatch an area defined by an ellipse.

After working on some autolisp code where I needed to create several HATCH entities, I figured that using (entmake) to do the job would be much faster than pushing the command line version of the HATCH command.

I didn't have my own example of this, and after checking out the DXF reference, it looked a bit more complicated than other entities, so I set out in search of some sample code that worked.... which led me to a post by "CarlB" over in the CADTutor forums that he had posted a few years ago. This worked great until I added in the scale factor and changed the pattern from SOLID to ANSI31. After a few iterations of trial and error, I managed to make it do what I wanted.

When using a real pattern (as opposed to SOLID), you have to specify a few more parameters. Head over to this thread in the CADTutor forums for the example code.

As it turns out, using (entmake) is about 10 times faster than using the (command) function in this case.

EDIT: I failed to mention that the example posted at the link above is for hatching a simple boundary defined by four lines. If you have arcs or other entities involved, the code will be a bit different.

I see a lot of posts in the discussion groups where someone creates a PDF from a drawing and the PDF file size ends up being several times larger than the drawing itself.

OLE objects or images in the drawing. Both can cause the resulting PDF to be large. Remember that images are referenced into drawings and they are not included in the file size of the DWG file.

Time once again to vote in the AUGI Board of Directors election of 2009.

Please make note of the following items.

• There are 8 positions to be filled
• There are 9 candidates on the ballot
• You may vote YES for (0) candidates, up to 8 candidates
• This election is being conducted using a "Ranked ballot" (as defined in the By-Laws), so the 8 candidates who receive the most votes will be put into office.
• Voting "NO" for a candidate has no effect whatsoever.
• Voting closes at 12:01am (CST), December 16th 2009.

Click here to vote now (Voting is over now...)