Datasheet

VTENABLE (View Transition Enable)
AutoCAD 2006 added a view transition feature that smoothly changes magnification or
location when zooming or panning. This replaced the abrupt transitions of prior releases.
Some people love it, and some people don’t. VTENABLE allows you to turn it off for
everything, for panning only, for zooming only, for scripts only, or for some combination.
The VTFTS and VTDURATION variables control the threshold and speed of the transi-
tion. Personally, I turn it off to speed things up a little.
Utilities
Utilities allow you to do things like rename files and purge unused layers. There are just
a few things here, but one that could be a huge timesaver is the use of wildcards in the
RENAME command, particularly when you bind an XRef.
PURGE
The PURGE command is used to selectively remove unused layers, blocks, styles, line-
types, and dimstyles. You can do this by name or using the Purge All option (ALL at the
command line). If your drawing has nested block definitions (blocks used to create other
blocks), you can select Purge Nested Items starting with AutoCAD 2002. In earlier
releases, use the PURGE command as many times as there are levels of nesting in your
block definitions in order to ensure that you’re purging everything. The Purge dialog
box also allows you to select individual entities individually or in groups. To select a con-
secutive list of entities, select the beginning item, hold down the Shift key, and select the
last item in the group. The Ctrl key lets you add or remove items from the selection set.
See Figure 1.20.
Many people still use the WBLOCK command as a quick and complete PURGE com-
mand. That requires you to use the Entire Drawing option in the dialog box for WBLOCK,
or the * option at the command line.
RENAME
This is a great way to rename blocks, dimension styles, layers, linetypes, materials, table
styles, text styles, UCSs, views, and viewports. You can use wildcards, allowing you to
Because holding down the middle wheel allows panning in all directions, the Windows
scrollbars aren’t useful and often get in the way. Turn them off under the Display tab of the
Options dialog box, and you’ll get a 4 percent increase in screen area. If you paid $400 for
your monitor, that’s like getting $16 just for changing a setting!
36 ■ chapter 1: AutoCAD Productivity
09939c01.qxd 12/5/06 3:59 PM Page 36