AUGIWorld Magazine - November/December 2008 - (Page 24) AUTOCAD Unlocking the Power of AutoCAD 2009 ficient at what I was doing. AutoCAD can be customized in the following ways. Beginners • Blocks and drawing templates • Tool palettes • User profiles • Command line switches • Command aliases Intermediate • Action macros • Scripts • Menu customization • Linetypes, shape files, and hatch patterns Advanced • Visual LISP/AutoLISP • Visual Basic for Applications • .NET APIs • ObjectARX NOTE: The above order and classifications are based on personal experience and in talking to others who customize and/or write programs for AutoCAD. Ground floor: the basics The bustle of the holiday season and Autodesk University is upon us once again, so I thought I would do an article based on a topic that I have been attempting to pitch to Autodesk as an AU class for a number of years now. Maybe this will get Autodesk to offer it, but then again this might make for a better article than a presentation. While I could go on forever about how to customize AutoCAD®, I hope this article provides you with a good introduction to all the different customization options available. AutoCAD is one of the most widely used 2D drafting and 3D modeling programs in the industry, yet many companies use only a fraction of its full capability. While AutoCAD offers a lot of function24 ality “out of the box” the true power of AutoCAD is often left untapped and unrealized. To go beyond the out-of-the-box behavior of AutoCAD, you need to give it some guidance. I am not saying you just sit AutoCAD down with a copy of your company’s employee handbook and CAD standards; I am talking about customizing it. Customizing AutoCAD does not mean that you need a Computer Science degree or that you must be an expert programmer. (Okay, it doesn’t hurt, but it is definitely not a requirement.) When I first started customizing AutoCAD more than a dozen years ago, I started with simple repetitive tasks that required only a basic understand of AutoCAD and the desire to be more ef- When you first set out to learn how to customize AutoCAD, you want to look at what you already know and the opportunities (repetitive tasks) that you can improve. Creating common blocks and drawing templates that contain drawing objects and styles you find yourself creating over and over again can give your drawings a consistent look and increase your productivity. Custom blocks can help to form the cornerstone of the CAD standards in your company. Tool palettes on the Tool Palettes window (see Figure 1) can be customized to contain your custom blocks, making it easier to access them without having to use the Insert command. Block tools on a tool palette can be customized to enforce specific layers and scales for your blocks when they are being inserted. Along with blocks, you can also create tools based on drawing objects such as w w w. A U G I . c o m http://www.augi.com
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