Are you as excited as I am about another release of AutoCAD? What's going to be in it? How many of our wishes will be granted? Well the Autodesk Gods have given me permission to give you a glimpse into some of the fabulous new features in everyone's favorite design package...so hold onto your seats!
1. Dynamic Blocks
Imagine being able to edit an individual instance of a block without exploding it? How about multiple insertion points on a block? How about multiple block definitions bundled up into one (one block called valve, many different variations)...you simply pick the desired definition upon insertion. Does all of this sound too good to be true? All this and more with the new powerful Dynamic Blocks.
2. Changes to Everyday Commands
Now these are always my favorite new features - anything that affects our everyday drawing life...here are just a few teasers of things to come:
a. You can now choose to combine zoom and pan commands together when undoing (don't you hate it when it takes 10 "undos" just to get past your zooms?
b. Speaking of Undo - many editing commands now have their own "Undo" built into them. Commands such as Copy, Offset, Fillet and Chamfer allow you to undo just the last operation.
c. Copy, Move, and Stretch maintain the most recent displacement throughout the current editing session. Rotate and Scale maintain the most recent rotation angle and scale factor respectively.
d. A new command called JOIN combines multiple segments of like objects into a single object (remember the popular GLUE command?)
e. You can now customize the AutoCAD scale list that displays in the Plot dialog box, the Viewport toolbar, and the Properties Palette. Add it once and it will always be available to you.
f. Mtext really is truly "what you see is what you get" (hoorah!). It also supports bullets and numbering along with various other "Word-like" features.
3. Hatching Treats!
Ever try to control EXACTLY where a hatch pattern lands? AutoCAD 2006 lets you specify the hatch origin while creating or editing a hatch. You no longer need to zoom out to display the entire boundary while hatching because now you can hatch within boundaries that extend beyond the visible display. You can also create separate hatch objects within one hatch command.
These are just a few of the new treasures you can look forward to in AutoCAD 2006 - stay tuned all week as I write about a few more!
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