Convert Points Between Ucs And Wcs Autocad Lt For Mac
Every point in an AutoCAD drawing file can be identified by its X,Y,Z coordinates. This system of coordinates is referred to in AutoCAD as the world coordinate system. It isn't easy if you stay in the WCS, but AutoCAD lets you set a new UCS.
The fact that one of the Express Tools finally got an update. Not just a minor maintenance tickle or mere absorption into the core code, either.
A real update, resulting in not only bug fixes but genuinely useful improvements in functionality. A little background on Express Tools might help put this into context. The history goes back to 1992 and AutoCAD Release 12. In addition to an impressively full set of paper manuals, people with Release 12 (great value at US$500 to upgrade from any earlier release) obtained a Bonus CD containing 2605 files of free add-on goodness. Fonts, LISP, DOS and Unix utilities, sample drawings, demos, all sorts of stuff. Remember that just popping on the web to grab that sort of thing wasn’t really an option at the time, so this CD was quite a big deal. Release 13 didn’t have an equivalent CD (although it had many other things – most of them bugs), but with Release 14 in 1997 there was a concerted effort to add extra value.
A program was put in place to produce a set of bonus stuff, partially developed by external parties. Unlike the Release 12 material, the Release 14 Bonus Tools were (kind of) incorporated into the main product, although they remained unsupported: Although we put a great deal of effort into making sure the Bonus Tools are free of problems, they are not officially supported by Autodesk. We do not guarantee that the results are 100% error free. To use the bonus tools, choose the Full installation option or select Bonus and Batch Plotting during a custom installation. The installation program places the bonus files in the BONUS CADTOOLS directory and puts that directory in the Support File Search Path.
The installation program also appends your ACADR14.LSP and ACAD.MNL files to ensure the proper loading of the bonus support file ACBONUS.LSP and menu file ACBONUS.MNU. A lot of the things we now take for granted in AutoCAD were born as a result of this initiative.
With AutoCAD 2000, Bonus Tools were renamed as Express Tools and some R14 Bonus Tools were removed while others were added to the core product. Several more features were added to an already handy collection, including TXT2MTXT: The history of Express Tools has been less illustrious since that high point. Autodesk made an ill-advised attempt to make money from them by removing them from AutoCAD 2000i and 2002 and first of all making them available only to VIP/Subscription (now called maintenance) customers as a carrot, then offering them for sale as AutoCAD Express Tools, Vol 1-9. That little business venture was always doomed to fail, and you can still find many sets of instructions allowing people with AutoCAD 2000 to carry across their Express Tools to 2000i and 2002.
Since then, other than some commands being absorbed into the core, it has been “maintenance mode” for Express Tools. This means the code just gets recompiled when necessary and very little actual maintenance goes on. As a result, some 20th Century bugs live on to this day.
Enough history! So what is this best thing? As a byproduct of improvements to PDFImport, the TXT2MTXT command was redone. Not much about this gets mentioned, but a whole bunch of very good things happened to this seemingly simple command (main source ):.
You can select Mtext objects in addition to Text objects. A Settings option on the Command line displays the Text to MText Settings dialog. In the past you had to press Enter at the start of the command to see the dialog box. Character codes translate correctly between Text and Mtext (e.g. Text underlining appeared as%%U when converted to Mtext). The “Select objects” prompt adheres to standard error checking and messaging. For example, objects on locked layers are filtered from the selection set.
Justification (Top left, Top center, Top right) is inferred for the Mtext object being created based on the positioning of the text objects in the drawing instead of always using Top left justification. When no justification can be logically inferred, it defaults to top-left. Numbered and lettered list formatting is inferred when the word-wrap text box is checked. If a line starts with one or two characters followed by a period and up to 10 spaces, list formatting will be applied automatically. The top-down sorting order is relative to the current UCS and sorting is left-to-right when text objects are collinear. When multiple text objects are collinear, they are treated as if on the same line with a space between them.
A new Settings option enables you to force uniform line spacing or maintain existing line spacing. Various bugs are fixed that caused unexpected results when in a non-WCS UCS. An option was added to the Settings dialog box to not combine selection into a single mtext objects (converts text object to mtext without combining). That last item alone could be a huge time-saver. If you need to convert 100 text items to mtext (e.g. For background masking reasons), you can now use the command once rather than 100 times.
Convert Points Between Ucs And Wcs Autocad Lt For Mac 2018
Sure, there are LISP routines to do this (I’ve written some myself), but incorporating it into the core product makes things easier for large numbers of people. It would not be a bad idea for Autodesk to go through all of the Express Tools looking for similar bug fixes and improvement opportunities. Instead of occasional ad-hoc drip-by-drip adoption of an Express Tool or two into the core, I propose that a special project be undertaken to go through the whole lot, fixing and improving them all. Once done, add them all to the supported functionality of the product, along with any related functionality that makes itself apparent during the overhaul. Such a project strikes me as something relatively easy to do that would go down very well among customers. Or how about some totally new stuff? Express Tools 2018 – The Next Generation?
If you already familiar with 3D modeling in AutoCAD, then you must be familiar with controlling coordinate system. The coordinate system you define will be a UCS (User Coordinate System). In 2D, there are many things that you can do by controlling coordinate system.
In this article, we are going to discuss how to control it and why. So Why Would We Need to Move/Rotate Our Coordinate?. Working on angled coordinate/object.
UCS (user coordinate system) icon is showing you X axis and Y axis, an the origin. As you know, we input the point coordinate base on those axis. When we need to draw angled object in AutoCAD, in some cases it would be easier if we rotate the coordinate temporarily. Working on local coordinate. Surveyor often need to work with local coordinate, but they may not mess up with the global coordinate. In AutoCAD, we can consider World Coordinate System (WCS) as global coordinate and User Coordinate System (UCS) as local coordinate.What a coincidence. When I’m thinking about this post, Autodesk release a video on YouTube:.
How We Can Control the Coordinate System? In the old days, we type UCS enter and choose the options. We still can do it now, but if you are not command line big fan, you may want to use the ribbon panel. Go to view tab, coordinates panel. All the options are here. Advertisement - Article continues below The tools on first row, are used to move, save, or reset coordinate system to world coordinate system (WCS). On the second row, you can use the tools to rotate AutoCAD coordinate system using coordinate axis.
Except the last one, the one with the light bulb is for turning UCS icon on or off. The last row, there are tools that you can use to quickly aligned the coordinate by view, object, or picking 3 points.
Try to see AutoCAD extended tool tip to see more explanation. Examples Aligned Objects Let us see the building footprint below. Let’s say we need to draw the interior, parking lot and more objects to complete the AutoCAD drawing. It would be easier to rotate the coordinate system to complete the job.
In this example, I use object and pick a line in the drawing. As you can see, the UCS icon is now moved and aligned to the top most line (I pick that line). Now when we create rectangle, linear dimensions, etc it will be aligned to the current UCS orientation. And don’t forget, ortho mode and polar tracking also using the XY axis! Try to create linear dimension and see how it works. Using SNAPANG You can also use SNAPANG to rotate the cursor. It is very useful if you want to create line with specific angle.
By rotating the cursor, you only need to type the line length. However, SNAPANG doesn’t change the coordinate after you rotate the cursor. When you type 5,0 coordinate as next point, it will be created using current UCS.
Not aligned to the cursor. Thank you to Mark Loomis, Chad and Craig Black for bringing this up. Rotating View Still find it difficult? Many of us prefer to work with the object aligned to our screen. Now type PLAN at command line then press enter.
In the command option, choose Current UCS. Now you can see the viewport is now align to your new UCS, which is parallel to your screen. It’s much easier to work now, isn’t it? Using Local Coordinates Sometimes you need to draw or annotate relative to local coordinate and not to world coordinate. You surveyors should familiar with this. If you are in manufacturing industry, you probably need to annotate part/assembly coordinates, or holes coordinates.
In Architecture drawing, you may need to annotate the elevation view. This example, shows a rough elevation view (yes it’s bad and lazy drawing, I know), but the elevation level is not showing correctly. The bottom red line should be at 0,00 elevation. It’s because ordinate dimension use 0,0 as origin. We need to move the origin before create the ordinate dimension. So after we restore the UCS to World coordinate, the dimension will use the world coordinate value?
The right dimensions was created in word coordinate. The left dimensions on local coordinate. The value never changed even we move the UCS around to new places. So how do you use UCS to increase drawing productivity? Is there any other tips you want to share with us?
About Edwin Prakoso. Hello I have quit an annoying issue. I use quite often the UCS rotate function by object.
Now I have a drawing in which I can NOT draw according to the new UCS. Example: I have a building oriented by 7°. So to draw in parallell I use to set my Object UCS on a line of the building.
My Crosshair Lines seem to be turned/adapted by 7°. So far so good.
As I start drawing a line the Crosshair Lines become ‘normal’ again and the line is not drawn by 7° Afterward the Crosshair Lines turn to 7° again.