Chapter 15: Down the Hatch! 335

Figure 15-7: A veritable plethora of hatch patterns.

Like any other object, a solid hatch takes on the current object color — or the current layer’s color if you leave color set to ByLayer. Therefore, check whether the current object layer and color are set appropriately before you use the Solid hatching option (see Chapter 6 for details).

Here’s looking through you, kid

AutoCAD’s transparency object property is probably most useful (in 2D, anyway) when applied to solid hatches. You can use transparent solid hatches to demarcate areas on architectural floor plans or aerial photographs of project sites. In addition to the settings we list in the preceding paragraph, make sure that the current object or layer transparency is set correctly, too.

Editing Hatch Objects

Editing an existing hatch pattern is simple after you’re familiar with the Ribbon’s Hatch Creation tab. Follow these steps:

1.Select the hatch object.

AutoCAD opens the Hatch Editor contextual Ribbon tab and displays the hatch object’s current settings.

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336 Part III: If Drawings Could Talk

2.Make any desired changes and watch the real-time preview as you do. When you’re happy, click Close Hatch Editor to keep the changes.

Alternatively, you can use the Properties palette or the Quick Properties palette (described in Chapter 6) to make most existing hatch pattern changes. By default, AutoCAD displays the Hatch Editor tab when you click a hatch object, and opens the Quick Properties palette when you double-click a hatch object. The Quick Properties palette is especially good for changing several hatches at once.

Simple grip editing is also available. Select a hatch, and then hover the cursor over the round blue center grip. A contextual menu pops up to give you quick access to changing the hatch origin, angle, and scale, all without running the HATCHEDIT command. Don’t be misled by the Stretch option on the context menu, though; you can only move a hatch with this option — and when you do, it loses its associativity to its boundary.

Here are a few other hatch tips:

You can make one hatch look like another without even opening the Hatch Editor tab by using the Match Properties button on the Clipboard panel of the Ribbon’s Home tab.

The MIRRHATCH system variable lets you mirror drawing geometry that includes hatches without mirroring the hatch angle. This can be very useful when creating drawings of symmetrical objects. Model one half, apply the hatching, and then MIRROR (see Chapter 11) to get the other half. The hatch angle remains consistent on both sides of the mirror line.

You can find the area of any hatch object by simply selecting the hatch object and then opening the Properties palette. The area is listed in the Geometry section, near the bottom of the palette.

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.

Always try to apply hatching last. The HATCH command is smart enough to recognize text and dimensions that fall within the hatched area. It will treat them like sterile eggs and will automatically leave no hatch zones around them. If you forget, or if a need for a note arises later, you’ll need to apply background masking to the text. We discuss this in Chapter 13.

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16

The Plot Thickens

In This Chapter

Configuring printers and plotters

Plotting model space

Plotting to scale

Plotting paper space layouts

Plotting lineweights and colors

Controlling plotting with plot styles

Troubleshooting plotting

Despite the infinitesimally small number of offices without a computer (or two) on every desk, many people still want or need to work

with easily readable electronic drawings (can you spell PDF?) or actual, dead-tree paper drawings. You may need to give hard-copy prints or PDFs to your less-savvy colleagues

who don’t have AutoCAD, or to people on construction sites where relatively delicate computers wouldn’t survive very long. You may want to make some quick paper prints to pore over during your bus ride

home. You may even find that checking drawings the old-fashioned way — with ahard-copy print and a red pencil — turns up errors that managed to remain hidden on the computer screen.

Hard copies may also survive longer as historic records. There are 10-year-old CAD files that can no longer be opened because the company that produced the software that was used to create them no longer

exists, and their software won’t run on current operating systems. On the other hand, we can still read some Egyptian papyrus scrolls that are several thousand years old.

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