AutoCAD

I am starting a list of known bugs in Civil 3D here. Some of these may be inherited through AutoCAD.

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.

Notice that the panel is light gray and the icon text is white, which makes the text difficult to read. Here is how to fix it.....

Autodesk announced the new line of 2014 branded products this week. Since 2008, CAD Panacea has brought you a quick summary of the new AutoCAD features and here is the rundown for AutoCAD 2014.

Have you ever come across a block that you could not explode? You might try and get this message:

Command: explode
Select objects: 1 found
Select objects:
1 could not be exploded.
Command:

The ability to restrict blocks from being exploded was added many releases ago, but I still see a lot of users confused by this. Here is how to "fix it".

Have you ever wanted to run a script file on one or more drawings, without having to use the overhead of the entire AutoCAD application? Starting with AutoCAD 2013, you can. AutoCAD 2013 comes with a tiny application named AcCoreConsole.exe. (The AutoCAD Core Console). This is basically a stripped down version of the AutoCAD engine without the graphics screen.

There does not seem to be an option for changing text portions of dates (such as the name of the month) to UPPERCASE (or lowercase) using the Field command dialog box. All of the examples shown are in First capital.

However, if you explore other fields where there are options to change the case, you can see that setting a field to UPPERCASE simply adds some code to the end of the field like this: "%tc1".  

Have you even run into a problem in AutoCAD (or a vertical such as Civil 3D), that you can't figure out such as a drawing behaving strange, commands not acting right, commands not working, or maybe even the whole application just won't launch? One of the first things I would suggest is to have someone new log onto your machine and launch AutoCAD under their Windows profile, essentially creating a new "AutoCAD Windows Profile". If the problem goes away when you do this, then it is probably some error or corruption in your own "AutoCAD Windows Profile".

The LENGTHEN command has been around for over 18 years, it was introduced with Release 13 in November of 1994. Yet, I still see many instances where it is ignored and some other method is used in its place. So what can you do with the LENGTHEN command? Let's look at the 4 options, or ways it can work.

Autodesk CEO Carl Bass and R.K. McSwain at the Expert Elite Lunch, Las Vegas, NV, 2012-11-28

One of the events at AU2012 was a special luncheon on Wed., Nov 28. to announce the creation of the Expert Elite group, a select group of individual community members who have been recognized for their extraordinary contributions, helping customers by sharing knowledge, providing community leadership, and exemplifying an engaging style of collaboration that drives a healthy and valuable Autodesk customer community.

I was honored to be included among this groups initial members, composed of approximately sixty worldwide members. If you participate in the Autodesk forums, you may have noticed the term "Expert Elite" in use on some of the user titles. We have been empowered to better share our knowledge, while supporting our peers and the Autodesk Community in general.

Even though we are in the era of the Ribbon, you may still want to use certain toolbars. Here are 3 ways to access toolbars

• If you have ANY docked toolbar visible, right click in an empty toolbar area (but not on a visible toolbar), and from there you can choose a toolbar from the menu that appears. Each loaded menugroup will be listed
  
• If you do not have any docked toolbars but your Ribbon is enabled, go to the View tab on the Ribbon and find the User Interface panel, then the Toolbars dropdown. Choose the toolbar you want here.
  
• Lastly, you can use the command line method, using the -TOOLBAR command (note the leading hyphen). When you use -TOOLBAR, you must know the exact toolbar name you want to make visible, but this command has many options. You can dock the toolbar or make it floating. If you make it floating, you can specify the exact location using screen coordinates. If you accept the defaults location (0,0) the toolbar will appear in the upper left corner of your primary monitor. If you want to specify a different 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.

Of course the power of the -TOOLBAR command is that you can script this using a menu macro or lisp routine to place multiple toolbars exactly where you want to. 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.