commands

I was recently alerted, by a thread in the CADTutor forums, to a change made in AutoCAD LT. The SAVE command now performs a QSAVE. If that doesn't make sense to you, take a look at this post from 2008 for more details.

Essentially, the SAVE command is supposed to save the current drawing to a different name but without changing to the new drawing. So if you are working on A.DWG and you run the SAVE command and give it the name B.DWG, then B.DWG is created as a copy of A.DWG, but you are still working on A.DWG.

AutoCAD LT Technical Marketing Manager, Kate Morrical confirmed that this change is by design and not a bug, and told me that this was actually introduced in AutoCAD LT 2011. I found it strange that this change was not implemented in AutoCAD at the same time. This could not be a wishlist item, and I do not understand what is gained by removing existing functionality. Read more »

Ok, I know many of you know some of these, maybe even a few that know about all of them, but there are new AutoCAD users every day... Some of these are old and some are new.

So what is your favorite "obscure" command?

1. CONVERTPOLY (R14-R2010) - This undocumented command will allow you to convert "heavy" polylines to LWPOLYLINE's and vice versa. "Heavy" polylines are the pre-R14 version. They still have uses today, and the PLINETYPE system variable controls what gets created by default.
2. DBLIST (Version 2.0 - R2010) - This command will list every entity in the drawing. Useful when you think you have some entities that are not showing up. You can erase everything visible and then run DBLIST to see what else is still there.