Being Civil

Cannot Remove Selection with SHIFT+Pick

There are hundreds of small things and settings in AutoCAD that make drafting lot easier, but when some of them accidentally get turned off or on, sometimes it’s really a major effort to look for them and set the settings the way we wanted. For instance, using Shift-pick for selecting and de-selecting… When selecting multiple objects in a busy drawing often some things get selected by accident, so instead of starting over, we want to be able to just deselect the item and keep selecting more. I also have a habit of using SHIFT to select/deselect objects when I have selected too many.

That’s what Shift+Click is good for. Off course, this all work pretty nicely until there was a change in setting introduced for any reason or by conflicting settings in Raster Design that may be installed on the same machine. Our user reported that suddenly the SHIFT+Pick stopped working after a crash. If you have raster Design installed and configured on AutoCAD Civil 3D and your SHIFT key stopped working for "Shift+Pick" to remove objects from selection sets, or "Shift+Pick" to make multiple grips hot, then this might be the solution.

Without further ado, I will go ahead and provide you two usual suspects.

• MAPIOPTIONS settings
• IOPTIONS settings

Please do following:

1. In command line run the IOPTIONS
2. Go to the User Preferences tab
3. Uncheck the toggle Shift+Left Click Image Select

Also

1. Run MAPIOTIONS command
2. Go to General tab and uncheck “Shft+Left Click Image Select"

 With these two selections unchecked program should work like before. 

 

I want my settings back in Civil 3D 2012…

It is my great pleasure to introduce some of the bloggers that will be posting in the future on Being Civil. When we started back in the fall of 2008 (Brian Kling, Jason Hickey, Justin Ziemba, Seth Hall and I) we were concentrating on Civil 3D and its core functionality. Our goal throughout this entire period was to help our customers and share some of what we know with the rest of us. In order to bring it all to the next level we decided to bring more power to the team of us so that our readers could get a different perspective to the issues we all are facing daily.

In the previous period some people moved to other roles while some others came to replace them. Now, 413 posts and almost 500,000 page views later, have what we are now – Being Civil blog, supporting our infrastructure users around the globe. You can read our posts on Facebook or Twitter or receive them via RSS feeds. It's just a small milestone we have reached and we thought you needed to know about it. We see your support every day and we hope it will continue to grow in the future. If there is something you would like us to blog about please drop us a note and we’ll be happy to help.

You already had a chance to get some of the Map 3D perspective from Nathan Moore, as well as to read some posts about Storm Sewer Analysis (SSA) from Matt and Anurag. Now we are introducing Tatiana Machado and Phil Borycens and I am sure you will be able to get more from them in the nearest future. To learn more about our new additions please visit their own pages on the left (About the authors section). Today it will be Tatiana’s first post on Being Civil. Please join me in welcoming Tatiana and Phil.

                                                                                                                         - Almas -

 

This will be like the second part of Add Reset User Settings in Civil 3D 2012 post from back in May of this year. We had some user asking, “OK, I just saved my custom setting... but now what can I do with the ZIP file that is created before resetting my setting and how I can get my settings back?” Well, you would need to do a similar procedure to the one that you did before to create your reset user setting shortcut.

I am one of those that think that an image is worth 1,000 words, so here is a short video that you can follow to get this done.

Migrating Your Custom Settings

If you remember my last post about Reset User Settings you may got familiar with AdMigrator.exe utility inside of AutoCAD. The whole story was to use it for resetting user settings or how we called it (reinitiating secondary installer) to get your (corrupted) settings to the default state. The same utility could be used (without /reset switch) and have program display the dialog which would allow you to move your customization between different versions of Civil 3D.  This will not move your Survey Settings, custom tool palettes and assemblies, parts catalogs, templates or other Civil specific settings. This will also not resolve all the migration issues, but could be a good tool to move you forward. Note that some tools may be available in new release but not in the old one, hence a possibility that you may need to take special caution and set your expectations straight. If you get stuck in one of these tasks feel free to visit Being Civil to find some of the tips we already published or submit a Service Request or Forum question. Click continue to see how.

Civil 3D Landing Page?

What is Civil 3D landing page you may ask? Our friends from Content Management team have provided us with a page that can serve as a portal for many Civil related questions and issues starting from product information to troubleshooting.

On this page you may see some training materials, videos, general information about products, useful documentation, recent downloads and technical solutions…pretty much all you need to know to start your Civil 3D journey if you are a novice Civil 3D user. Users tips and tricks if you are seasoned user, or some help troubleshooting and searching our knowledge base or a quick access to forums if you have years of Civil 3D use under your belt - all from the same spot neatly organized and frequently updated. The landing page can be accessed from here: http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/index?siteID=123112&id=3571865&linkID=9240697

Believe me, if there is one page about Civil 3D you would want to have bookmarked this would be the one. 

 

New Things to Being Civil Blog

If you are reading this post you may have already noticed few things different to this Blog. With growing popularity of social media such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as our world wide presence we decided to add few cool features to help the message get out there quicker and stronger.

 

On the top right you may see a Google Translate bar. All of our non-English speakers may appreciate this tool. Please look at Google Translate as a work in progress tool. Some languages or articles are spot on, while others are not so much. The tool is getting better every day and maybe in the future will be good enough to do an error proof translation. But, until then use it to get the sense and better understanding of the topic we are are covering in the post.

Right below the post you may now see a star rating for the post. This way you can give us your instant feedback. With this tool we will be able to report the topics of your interest and learn from it. Off course, the more popular subject and rating is the more similar areas we will try to cover. Other way to look at it is to virtually “tip your server”. If you are happy with what you are getting please tell us so.

Slightly below the Star rating widget, there is another tool that basically link the post to a similar previous posts. I have to admit, I am not sure how the linkage is being determined, but suspect there is some smart gremlin running inside, reading the post and deciding what links to what. If you have better explanation please share it with us.

Even further down, there are few buttons which allow you to tweet (Twitter) the post or Like (Facebook) the post. If you like it or you think it’s worth sharing, then don’t be shy. Just click it!

Unlike other “Like” under post, the Like at the left side is used if you like Being Civil Blog Facebook page. Yes, we do have Facebook page! Please use these addition and help us spread the word. Help us get the cool tips and ideas get further than our closed community. Evangelize and educate!

 

 

Tips: How To Find File, List Of System Variables And Its Settings, and more

Today I thought of sharing two tips and one tool that would help us communicate better. By now, you know that we at Civil Support are big fans of Jing (Screencast) video capturing software. As a matter of fact we loved it so much that our own Justin Ziemba blogged about it once before. I personally had some problems recently during uploading my videos to their server. It would  occasionally stop uploading, uploading it painfully slowly and the file sizes were pretty big considering what I had before. Being unaware of the possible (unwanted) changes in my settings and being under deadlines I turned to alternative. It is called Pixetell. Both Pixetell and Jing share pretty similar workflow so it does not matter which one you use; you should not be having any trouble learning how to use it. If you would like to give it a test drive of free program called Pixetell you can get it from here: http://www.pixetell.com/. Remember the goal is to get us be on the same page when communicating regardless of your screen capturing preference. You know how they say that picture is worth thousand words. Then think of how many words would video be worth?

 

Now… going to tell you what I intended to share at the first place. Sometimes you receive the error message referencing one or more specific files. It is very common to look for LIN (linetypes) file, CUIX (customization files), or some other installation files or files from your user directory. Other times you are looking for a file which you know it exists but not sure how to get to it. Easy thing to do is to use AutoCAD to get you your file. Let’s say you wanted to check your acad2011doc.lsp file. By now you realized that Windows Search does not always give you correct results if searching your entire C: drive. Instead of manually checking Program Files, User subdirectories or ProgramData folder all you need to do it to type following and program will present you the path. (findfile “acad2011doc.lsp)

Other tip I wanted to share is another AutoCAD command useful if you would like to check the system variable settings and your list of all System variables and paths used on your machine. When is this useful? In case you have one drawing object shows different behavior then other. If your machine is not showing the same as others.  Notorious for that are variables such as PSLTSCALE and MSLTSCALE, Linetype Generation, etc. In that case you may consider comparing system variable settings.

1. Type SETVAR in command line and then type ?, followed by *
2. On the next prompt And then *. Will show all variables and its settings.
3. This should open AutoCAD Text Window with all System variables and settings

Another way is to ACADINFO command which will save all settings into TXT file for your review.

I hope you would find these tools and tips helpful.

Styles Management Made Easy

Have you ever received a drawing from an outside consultant and wanted to convert it to use your company standard styles? This was possible with a manual process of inserting your drawing template as a block into the consultant’s drawing, but command settings were still not set up correctly. With the Subscription Advantage Pack for AutoCAD Civil 3D 2011, a previously undocumented command has been exposed that helps with this process. Follow the link to see!

Importing Multiple Sheets From PDF File

This is one of mine How-to posts, inspired by the customer who wanted to know how if Civil 3D 2011 can import PDF files and how to import multiple sheets. Little history first. Back in AutoCAD 2009 there was a Bonus Pack which allowed import of PDF files into Civil 3D. Jason Hickey used to blog about it. If you want to hear the entire story you may find it here. 

In Civil 3D 2010 and Civil 3D 2011 there is an option to import PDF images in a drawing. So no need to be installing Bonus pack or any extension to do this. And as with almost ever tying in AutoCAD, there are multiple ways to do the same thing. First one is from External Reference dialog (you may Type IMAGE or XREF):

 

Then browse to the location of the PDF file containing multiple sheets. At the end you just need to select which sheets you would like to import and position of them in the drawing

Other way is through Insert ribbon, Attach button (or command ATTACH). This will open up familiar Browse dialog box at which one of the “Files of Type” option is PDF. Finally it will also bring the same “Attach PDF Underlay” dialog which will allow you to select the pages and insertion points.