AutoCAD Align Command

Have you ever wanted to move and rotate objects in AutoCAD all in one command? That is exactly what the ALIGN command does, and it can optionally scale the objects too. Basically you specify a pair of source points and a pair of destination points to define the movement of the selected objects. The source points are then aligned to the destination points, performing a move and/or rotate in the process. If your source and destination points are not the same distance apart then you can optionally tell the command to perform scaling also. The first source/destination point are held as the base point for the scaling operation.

In the simple example below, the blue square on the right is being held in place and we want to align the other blue square to it. Note the location of the source and destination points.

The result is shown below.

In this next scenario, the source object is smaller than the target. We are going to instruct it to NOT scale the source object.

You can probably guess the result here. The smaller square is aligned to the larger one, but its size is not changed.

Below is the same thing, except we are going to tell ALIGN to scale the source object.

Here is the result.  The two source points were scaled up to match the two destination points.

Of course these are simple examples with only one object being modified. Your selection can be any number of objects.  How do you use the ALIGN command? Questions? Leave a comment.