Tips and tricks

An overview of things that often come up during training courses, some practical shortcuts and a few lesser-known commands that can simplify your daily drawing work.

This page is under construction and somewhat unstructured. Over time we will organize it better.

Useful commands that aren’t always in the ribbon yet:

SFH: Creates a solid hatch in a boundary. For example, draw a rectangle, type SFH and click inside the rectangle. You can also do this with HATCH, but this is often faster. If the drawing is too busy, the boundary sometimes can’t be found. In that case, zooming in often helps. If what is on the screen is reasonably clear, it usually works.

PURGEB5: Cleans up the drawing by removing unused blocks. It can make a DWG file a lot smaller if it contained many or large blocks.

LWDEFAULT The line thickness you get when printing (making a PDF) if you don’t use a lineweight. If the lineweights are too heavy in the PDF, you can use this to make them smaller. If a value of 9 still gives lines that are too thick, something else is going on. TIP: press Ctrl+5 in Acrobat Reader to view a PDF with or without lineweights.

LAYHERDECK and LAYHERTOWER: Draws a deck or tower from two points. Only works well in a mm drawing, and the definition is in InsertDeck.csv and InsertTower.csv in the support folder (for die-hards only).

SCATTSYNC: Fixes all attributes after a change to the block definition. For example, if you modified the bottom right corner of a drawing. Also use it when the position of the attributes is no longer correct.

PLINS, PLDEL, PLCURVE and PLLINE: Commands to edit a polyline: add or delete segments, or change a segment to a curve or to a line.

CXB, CYB, CZB: Copies a block along its own axis, instead of the UCS or WCS. This sometimes saves switching back and forth between UCS and WCS, but you need to know the axes of the block if you want to get it right the first time.

NOSELECTLOCKEDLAYERS This command makes sure a locked layer can no longer be selected. For example, if hatches are on a layer and that layer is locked, this setting makes it much easier to select objects that sit on top of the hatches.

NOSELECTXREFS Similar to the above, but when this is on, XREFs can no longer be selected. Ideal if you use the surroundings as an underlay and draw objects on top of it.

FORCEOSNAPZ A cryptic name for a command that makes sure that, when you work in the top view, you don’t accidentally move something in height, the Z direction. If you work in another view such as isometric, you can simply work in 3D.

DYNMODE Set this setting to 7 and turn on Polar (at the bottom of the status bar) and you get dynamic input for M and C (move and copy) on the X, Y and Z axis.

Hide xreflayers This setting is in the menu that opens when you click the gear icon above the layers panel. It hides all layer names of the xrefs, which makes the layer list a lot clearer.

UPATT After filling in the bottom right corner in your layout, you can use UPATT to quickly update the values in all other layouts.

Also take a look at the changelog, which also lists commands that aren’t (yet) a button in the SCAD Re-Event interface.