Ever since installing (finally) Civil 3D and beginning to put it to use, I’ve had this problem with my Vault toolbar disappearing on me. It’s the weirdest thing. When Civil is loading up, I could see it on the screen, but as soon as the load finished and I was presented with the crosshairs, it would just disappear.

I’ve uninstalled and reinstalled the Vault client a couple times, and done numerous Google searches for a solution and could find nothing. Today I figured it out.

What worked for me was to go into the CUI and edit the current Workspace. Drill down into toolbars and select the one for Vault (which was already checked on). On the lower right, you’ll see a box where you can change the location in which the toolbar is docked. Mine was set to floating, and I changed it to simply Top. Apply and OK and once I was back at the crosshairs the toolbar was there!

Hope this works for you as well.

Today we will be updating the blog to Wordpress 2.5, so if you see anything that looks squirrely, please bear with us. I’m sure this will screw something up, at least temporarily. You can leave a comment under this post if you want to report a problem or discovered bug. Hopefully this will be pretty painless.

Oh yeah, we’ve added 3 new authors to the lineup, so maybe the pace of new content will pick up somewhat. I’ll let them introduce themselves.

- Mike

A couple of things that would be really nice to see added to Autocad at some point. The first is one I’ve entered into the AUGI Wishlist for a few years now, and the second is one that just dawned on me the other day. Both seem useful. Let me know if I’m just crazy or overlooking some functionality already in there.

1. I’d lilke to be able to toggle on/off seeing the list of layouts in the Page Setup Manager. About 95% of the time I KNOW what setup my layouts have, because they’re set in my template, but when I want to print using a different setup (e.g. half-size, pdf, etc.), I hate having to scroll past 25 layout items to get to the loaded setups. Having toggle there to quickly hide those would be swell.

2. Whenever I do need to mass change all of the layouts in my drawing, I think it would be really helpful to have an item in the right-click menu for the layout tabs that basically works as a match properties from the last page setup of the previous layout changed. Call it “Match Previous Layout” and only have it selectable when a previous layout has been recently set. I have a bunch of page setups, and when I need to change all of my layout tabs to something other than what is default, it becomes quite a tedious chore. It’d be nice if I could set one, and then right-click on each tab and choose “Match Previous Layout” and have it set that page setup accordingly. Or better yet, select ALL of the layouts and match them.

It seems everyone has their own preferences when it comes to command shortcuts. I’ve seen 15 different key-combinations for the CIRCLE command. Personally, I try to keep most of the commands I use frequently on the left side of my keyboard. Just today someone asked me for a copy of my acad.pgp file, so I thought I’d go one step further.

If you have a better combination for a certain command, leave me a comment and let me know about it!

Read the rest of this entry »

With every release of AutoCAD comes new features, commands and system variables. Many of these are well documented. At the same time, other commands that have long been in use that are forgotten or dropped from documentation, but still functional in the software. Here is a short listing of some of my favorite obscure commands.

MULTIPLE
When entered preceeding another command, will repeat the command until you cancel out of it.

CIRCULAR ARRAY
At the command line enter -array, pick the object(s), and when you are presented with the Rectangular or Polar options, enter C for Circular instead.

TCIRCLE
creates a circle, slot or rectangular object around selected text, mtext or attdef entities.

CHSPACE
changes objects from model space to paper space and vice versa.

XLINE
use it to create a never-ending construction line in both directions.

RAY
use it to create a never-ending construction line in one direction.

TFRAMES
toggles wipeout frame visibility.

WHOHAS
when you try to open a file that is already in-use, this command will tell you who is using it (this is a default trigger in version 2007 and up).

PEDITACCEPT
set this to “1″, and it won’t ask you “do you want to convert this line to a pline”. It just does it automatically.

WP or CP (selection)
when used with a command that prompts you for a selection, this will let you use a polygon window/crossing instead of a rectangular one.

._DBLIST
lists all entities in the drawing.

MOCORO
move, copy, rotate in one command and from the same basepoint.

‘(command)
run another command transparently inside of the original command.

Credit and thanks for not only the idea for this thread, but also for many of the included commands, goes out to the guys and gals on the AUGI forums, specifically this thread.

Have an obscure command that you want to share? Use the comment form to post it up.