Tips & Tricks

Drawing Building Pads

This trick will work in any version of AutoCAD from r14 on.

In most aspects of A/E/C work, we spend a lot of time drawing orthogonal shapes.  Whether drafting maps of existing conditions or designing something new, there is no shortage of buildings, tanks, parking lots, etc. with a whole bunch of 90° corners.

Many people draw a horizontal line and a vertical line at one corner, then offset and trim like crazy, and finally move and rotate into position.  Others get a little more sophisticated and translate the dimensions into absolute or relative coordinates and type away.

There is an easier way!

If your shape is aligned with the X & Y axes, you're good to go.  If not, you may want to adjust SNAPANG before you begin to avoid having to rotate later.

Turn ORTHO on, and start a polyline at any convenient corner.  Drag the cursor in any direction and let go.  (Do not click!)  Enter the distance to go in that direction and press <ENTER>.  Then drag the cursor in the next direction and enter the appropriate distance.  Repeat this procedure all the way around the figure.  Now wasn't that easier?!

For shapes with recurring incremental angles, you may want to get fancy and adjust the polar snap settings.  (See 'DSETTINGS' command, 'Polar Tracking' tab.)

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Q & A

Q.  How come hatches in an XREF obliterate my drawing?  I have reordered everything with the DRAWORDER command, and it works just fine.  But then when I XREF that same drawing into another, it seems to completely ignore the order of the objects!  What am I doing wrong?

A.  Well, the short answer is that you're doing nothing wrong.  I can already hear your frustration:  "Well, what is the problem, then?!"  The real issue is how AutoCAD handles drawings.  A drawing is simply a database.  But instead of mailing addresses or financial data, it contains geometric objects and their associated properties.  Think of this database as the pile of papers on your desk.  (What, you keep a clean desk?  Then imagine the pile of papers on *my* desk!)  As you complete new work, it goes on the top of the pile.  And if you pull a page out from the middle of the stack to make some changes then put it back on the pile, it is now on top instead of where it used to be.  AutoCAD works in a similar way.  The drawing database is a pile of objects.  The first object you created in a drawing is likely at the bottom of the stack; and each subsequently created object is placed on top.  Likewise, if you edit an object (trim, fillet, break, etc.) you are pulling it from the bottom and moving it to the top.  This is not a perfect analogy, but it works.  AutoCAD displays objects in order.  When you regen a drawing, AutoCAD paints each object on the screen starting at the beginning of the database.  Quite often, this is not the same as the order of importance we desire in the final hard copy.

AutoCAD's attempt to help us with this is the 'DRAWORDER' command.  DRAWORDER can be helpful, but you need to understand what it is doing.  DRAWORDER simply records your instructions as to how things should show up on the screen.  In many cases. this might solve the problem.  But if you use XREFs, DRAWORDER will not help you.  When you XREF a drawing, AutoCAD reads that drawing's database.  DRAWORDER gave AutoCAD display instructions, but it did not rearrange the database order.  In order to keep your hatches in the back and your text in the front, you need a solution that will physically re-order the drawing's database.

One option would be to plan ahead and draw objects from the back to the front.  This is obviously impossible.  Another option would be to somehow trace over or recreate the objects in order.  For a handful of objects this might be tolerable, but in the real world this is quite impractical.  After many headaches such as yours, we created a method to achieve this programmatically.  Our program HardSort automates this process.  HardSort physically rebuilds the drawing database by layer in the order you specify.  And because it is done at the database level, your results when plotting and XREFing will never be a surprise.  :o)

Click here for more information about HardSort. 

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