AutoCAD 2005 for Dummies

  Turning off word-wrapping works fine for short notes that fit on one line. If you think your note may be longer, specify a width instead of accepting the default value of 0.0. 

7. Press Enter to suppress word-wrapping, or move the cursor to the right or left to specify a width for word-wrapping; then click.

The command line prompts you to type a short note directly at the command line, or press Enter to type your note in the Multiline Text Editor window:

Enter first line of annotation text <Mtext>:

8. Press Enter to open the Multiline Text Editor window.

9. Enter your comment.

10. Click OK.

The Multiline Text Editor window closes and adds your comment to the drawing, next to the leader.

Figure 10-11 shows several different leaders with notes.

Figure 10-11: All leaders and no followers.

  If both the leader arrowhead and the text are the wrong size or appear to be missing entirely, the dimension scale isn’t set correctly in the drawing. (As I warn you earlier, AutoCAD treats leaders as a special kind of dimension object.) See Chapter 3 for detailed instructions on how to set the dimension scale. After you set the dimension scale properly, erase and re-create the leader and text.

  If you add a comment to a drawing and later decide that the comment merits a leader, you can use the qLEader command to draw the leader so that the end of the shaft ends up in the vicinity of the existing text object. Then, when the Multiline Text Editor window appears (Step 8 in the previous steps), click OK without entering any new text.

  A leader and the text that you draw with it are partially associated with each other. When you move the text, the leader’s shaft follows. Unfortunately, the converse isn’t true — moving the leader or one of its vertices doesn’t cause the text to follow.

Chapter 11 Down the Hatch

In This Chapter

? Adding hatching to your drawings

? Copying existing hatches

? Using predefined and user-defined hatch patterns

? Making solid and gradient fills

? Scaling hatches properly

? Choosing hatching boundaries

? Editing hatches

If you were hoping to hatch a plot (or plot a hatch), see Chapter 12 instead. If you want to hatch an egg, buy my companion book, Raising Chickens For Dummies. If you need to fill in closed areas of your drawings with special patterns of lines, this is your chapter.

Drafters often use hatching to represent the type of material that makes up an object, such as insulation, metal, concrete, and so on. In other cases, hatching helps emphasize or clarify the extent of a particular element in the drawing — for example, showing the location of walls in a building plan, or highlighting a swampy area on a map so you know where to avoid building a road. Figure 11-1 shows an example of hatching in a structural detail.

Figure 11-1: A big batch o’hatch.

An AutoCAD hatch is a separate object that fills a space, that has an appearance dictated by the hatch pattern assigned to it, and that is associated with the objects that bound the space, such as lines, polylines, or arcs. If you move or stretch the boundaries, AutoCAD normally updates the hatching to fill the resized area.

  Don’t go overboard with hatching. The purpose of hatching is to clarify, not overwhelm, the other geometry in the drawing. If your plots look like a patchwork quilt of hatch patterns, it’s time to simplify.

  Hatching is another kind of annotation of your geometry, similar in purpose to text and dimensions. As I describe at the beginning of Chapter 9, you’ll usually be more efficient if you save annotation for later in the drafting process. Draw as much geometry as possible first, and then hatch the parts that require it. In other words, batch your hatch.

Hatch… Hatch… Hatchoo

This section outlines the steps you use to add hatching to a drawing with the Boundary Hatch and Fill dialog box, shown in Figure 11-2. You can use this information to get started quickly with hatching. When you need more information about any part of the process, jump to the relevant sections of “Pushing the Boundary (of) Hatch,” later in this chapter.

Figure 11-2: The Hatch tab of the Boundary Hatch  and Fill dialog box.

The following steps show you how to hatch an enclosed area by using the “pick points” method of selecting the hatch area:

1. Open a drawing containing geometry that forms fully closed boundaries, or draw some boundaries by using the drawing commands I describe in Chapter 5.

The areas you want to hatch must be completely enclosed. The Circle, POLygon, and RECtang commands, and the Line and PLine commands with the Close option, make great hatch boundaries (see Chapter 5 for details).

2. Set an appropriate layer current, as described in Chapter 4.

  It’s usually best to put hatching on its own layer.

3. Start the bHatch command by clicking the Hatch button on the Draw toolbar.

The Boundary Hatch and Fill dialog box appears.

  For historical reasons, AutoCAD 2005 also has a HATCH command, which prompts you at the command line instead of opening a dialog box. Trust me — you want the bHatch command’s dialog box.

4. Choose Predefined, User Defined, or Custom from the Type drop-down list.

Predefined or User Defined works best for most purposes. See the next section for details. 

5. If you chose Predefined or Custom in the previous step, select any predefined or custom hatch pattern from the Pattern drop-down list or the Pattern button just to the right of it. If you chose User Defined, you don’t need to choose a pattern.

6. Specify an Angle and Scale for the hatch pattern (or, if you chose User Defined in Step 4, specify Angle and Spacing).

See “Getting it right: Hatch angle and scale,” later in this chapter, for more information.

7. Click the Pick Points button.