Chapter 15: Down the Hatch! 331

Hatching should be placed on a dedicated layer or layers so it can be easily turned on or off.

Layers for hatching should always use the Continuous line type. Many hatch patterns use noncontinuous lines, and if you put them on a layer with a noncontinuous line type, it confuses things to no end.

By default, when you select a number of closed areas and then press Enter, the hatched areas will be created as a single object; choose Create Separate Hatches on the Options slideout panel if you want to be able to modify each hatched area.

Set the Draw Order drop-down list to specify whether the hatch objects are in front of or behind the hatch boundary or other drawing objects (see Figure 15-5). By default, they get sent behind their boundary, which is typi-

cally what you want. If a hatch is a different color from its boundary and if it’s in front of its boundary, the tips of the hatch objects produce a dotted-line effect along the boundary.

Figure 15-5: Hatch options for every occasion.

Pushing the Boundary (Of) Hatch

In the remainder of this chapter, we show you how to refine the techniques presented in the preceding section. We describe how to copy existing hatching, take advantage of the various options in the Hatch and Gradient dialog

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332 Part III: If Drawings Could Talk

box (which offers a bit more control than the Hatch Creation contextual tab), and choose more complicated hatching boundaries.

Your hatching has no style!

A minor problem is that unlike text and dimensioning, you can’t create named styles for hatching. The good news is that three workarounds can help offset this.

Plagiarism 101: Editing hatches. Okay, it’s not really plagiarism, but it’s close. Suppose you have a drawing with several different styles of hatching applied. You now realize that one of them has the wrong specifications. No problem. Simply select the problem hatch, which brings up the Hatch Editor tab of the Ribbon. It’s virtually identical to the Hatch Creation tab. From the Hatch Editor tab, you can change any of the properties. The better news is that it also has an Inherit Properties button. Click it, and then click an existing hatch — the original hatch inherits all the properties of the selected hatch.

You can select more than one existing hatch at a time. Any changes you make on the Hatch Editor tab are applied to all the selected hatches.

Plagiarism 201: Cloning hatches. Suppose you have a drawing with several different styles of hatching applied, and now you want to hatch another area. You start the HATCH command, and the Hatch contextual Ribbon appears. Oops, it shows the specifications of the last hatch that was applied, which is quite different from what you want to do now. No problem; simply click the Match Properties button on the Options panel of the Hatch Creation tab, or the Inherit Properties button in the Hatch and Gradient dialog box. Pick an existing hatch, and hey! Presto! All the settings update to match the selected hatch! You can use the cloned settings as is, or you can modify them as desired.

Plagiarism 301: Palettizing hatches. Here’s one that even many experienced users miss. It is remarkably easy to customize AutoCAD so that a single mouse-click can produce any hatch style you want. Here’s how:

1.Apply a Hatch with the desired properties.

If your existing drawing has such a hatch, this step can be skipped.

Make sure that the existing hatch is on the correct layer and that the layer has all the correct properties.

2.Display the Tool Palette window.

Select the Tool Palettes tool from the Palettes panel of the View tab of the Ribbon. We discuss tool palettes in Chapter 2.

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Chapter 15: Down the Hatch! 333

3.Display the Hatches and Fills palette by clicking its tab.

If you can’t see this tab, click the overlapping edges of the tabs at the bottom of the palette window and select Hatches and Fills from the list that appears.

4.Create your new Hatch tool.

Click once to select the existing hatch object, pause, and then select it again. Drag it onto the tool palette and drop it.

Don’t double-click too quickly, and don’t click the blue grip, or you’ll just end up editing the existing object.

5.Use your new Hatch tool.

Click your hatch tool and then click inside a closed boundary in your drawing. Bingo! Instant hatching to your desired specifications! Note that it even puts hatching on the same layer as the original sample.

But wait! There’s more! If you start a new drawing, create a boundary, and then use your Tool palette to hatch it, you’ll be amazed to find that the new hatching in the new drawing is on the correct layer. If the correct layer doesn’t exist in the new drawing, AutoCAD creates it to match the original specifications.

This is standardization through customization.

Hatch from scratch

An alternative to using the Ribbon is the Hatch and Gradient dialog box, as shown in Figure 15-6. You don’t see your hatch object updating as you

change settings the way you do with the Ribbon, but you do have a bit more control over what you’re going to end up with. To display the Hatch and Gradient dialog box, click the dialog box launcher (the teeny arrow at the right end of the Options panel of the Ribbon’s Hatch Creation tab).

You can use predefined, user-defined, or custom hatch patterns. Most of the time, you’ll choose predefined hatch patterns unless some generous soul gives you a custom pattern. On the other hand, we haven’t used a userdefined pattern in over 25 years of using AutoCAD. They consist solely of continuous lines. All you can define is the spacing, the rotation angle, and whether the lines are parallel pairs. And all this can be duplicated with standard patterns.

By default, the right third of the Hatch and Gradient dialog box is hidden; to see the additional hatch options at the right side of the dialog box, shown in Figure 15-6, click the More Options arrow beside the Help button.

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334 Part III: If Drawings Could Talk

Figure 15-6: The Hatch tab of the expanded Hatch and Gradient dialog box.

Pick a pattern, any pattern: Predefined hatch patterns

To use AutoCAD’s predefined hatch patterns, select Predefined from the Type drop-down list at the top of the Hatch tab in the Hatch and Gradient dialog box. This selection sets the stage for choosing the hatch pattern.

You specify a predefined hatch pattern in one of two ways:

Pattern drop-down list: If you know the name of the hatch pattern, select it from the Pattern drop-down list. The list is alphabetical, except that SOLID (that is, a solid fill) appears at the very beginning.

Pattern button: If you don’t know the pattern name or if you prefer the visual approach, click the Pattern button (the tiny button with the ellipsis [three dots] to the right of the Pattern drop-down list and pattern name) to display the Hatch Pattern Palette with pattern previews and names.

Figure 15-7 shows some of the other predefined hatch patterns, which cover everything from Earth to Escher to Stars.

When is a pattern not a pattern? When it’s a solid fill

AutoCAD treats filling an area with a solid color as a type of hatching. Simply choose SOLID from the top of the Pattern drop-down list. You’ll also see several gradient-fill options.

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