Being Civil

Undocumented Commands Can Make Your Drawing More Stable

Before the phones started ringing this morning, I was catching up on some early reading.and ran across this article by Donnie Gladfelter. Donnie is a great friend of mine, and I am one of the people that he worked with a few weeks ago on his perfect storm issue. I had to call him this morning to talk about this article, as one of his links was a tiny bit outdated and not very easily found during a normal search of our knowledgebase. We discussed it, and I told him that I would write this as a supplement to his already excellent article to explain a bit more in-depth what was happening.

Drawing Cleanup - a tool you should all know about!

So we know in Product Support that there are some of you out there who regularly use the functions of Map 3D included within Civil 3D.  But there are many of you out there who hardly if ever touch the Map functions and don't really need to most of the time.  Well here's a tool that has been around a long time.  If you haven't used it, read on, as I'm sure it will come in handy at some point for you.

Go to the menu Map > Tools and select Drawing Cleanup (or you can type in _mapclean).  The first panel is where you choose which objects to work with.  On the second panel you choose the cleanup options you would like, I have highlighted some that I have found particularly useful:

 

Delete Duplicates - always good for cleaning drawings you get from other sub-contractors (I'm sure no one in your office ever creates duplicates, right?)

Break Crossing Objects - I love this one for testing pesky plines that won't join.  Or if you are having problems with feature lines, explode them back to a pline and run this little gem.  It will find any cases where the pline may have crossed back on itself, for example, and then you can use a small erase window to easily select the offending parts and delete them, rejoin or remake into a feature line, and just maybe, problem solved.

Zero Length Objects - well like it says, can clean out some little objects that are hard to find.

Weed Polylines - we have other ways to accomplish this, but this one works too, an oldy but a goody.

Spend just 10 minutes today reviewing the Help on this tool, get familiar with it and I'm sure it will come in handy before you know it.  Feel free to leave your own story on Mapcleanup, I'm sure I'm not the only one using it!