Do you get annoyed at AutoCAD when those little blue boxes that appear on objects and quickly start mashing the ESC key? Are these blue boxes, better known as Grips, just in your way? Let’s take a look at Grips…
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We’ve been seeing reports of missing thumbnail previews in the AutoCAD OPEN dialog box, usually in AutoCAD 2014 or 2013. This can usually be traced to the registry setting that controls this feature, which is: \\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Autodesk\AutoCAD\Rxx.x\ACAD-xxxx:xxx\Profiles\Profile_Name\Dialogs\Select File ;; Set the…
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In Civil 3D 2014 (and probably other versions such as 2013 and 2015), when you switch to a layout you may notice that the “Layout Tools” contextual tab appears. If you want to stop this behavior, follow these steps. Run…
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If you want a date field that always updates (or at least as often as defined by the system variable FIELDEVAL), use a DIESEL expression. (DIESEL stands for Direct Interpretively Evaluated String Expression Language). Here is an example that will…
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Many people are aware of the AutoCAD drawing (v 2.18) of the solar system, circa 1985. The name of the file is solar.dwg and it was included as a sample drawing at one point. You can download the drawing from…
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In recent versions of AutoCAD, we have seen cases where the xref fade setting (XDWGFADECTL) has no effect on arcs and circles in the xref drawing while other entities are faded correctly. To fix this problem, set the system variable…
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I have seen this question a few times in person and on various forums. For at least one version prior to AutoCAD 2011, AutoCAD arcs included directional arrow grips on the ends that performed as Lengthen grips. AutoCAD 2011 introduced…
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We have been recently running across AutoCAD DWG files that contain hundreds of non-purgable linetypes, some with strange names, some that appear to be nested in mysterious blocks, etc. With help from the Autodesk Forums and some independent research, I became…
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It is not uncommon to see this problem around the AutoCAD world. You press Ctrl+S or click the save icon and you get a message that says something like this: “Unable to save to drawing K:\mypath\mydrawing.dwg Drawing saved to SAV98C2.tmp”…
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Many Autodesk products including AutoCAD and verticals such as Civil 3D include a proprietary shortcut bar in file selection dialogs, known as the Places List. It’s the leftmost panel shown here. Thanks to Jay_B in the Autodesk Forums, I was…
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