Editing Scale Lists
Have you had that one scale that just isn’t part of the standards found in AutoCAD, or maybe you just don’t want to go through all the standard scales to work with the 5 or so that you do use on a daily basis. There is a new feature in AutoCAD that allows you to edit the list of scales that appears in the Plot dialog box, Viewport toolbar and several other places in AutoCAD. You can give scales names like Plan view or site view which is very different from past releases with you had to refer to them by their actual scale. One of the downsides is that the listing is stored in the Windows Registry and isn’t exported through AutoCAD Profiles which makes it hard to set them up on several different machines.



Forgot a Command’s Name, Now What?
AutoCAD 2006 goes above and beyond previous releases when it comes to accessing commands. Has there been a time you remembered the first couple letters of a command or an alias, but couldn’t quite remember it all. So you might have ended up yelling down the hallway to your neighbor or maybe you dug around on the Internet or in the online help system. You won’t need to do that anymore. It is now possible to type the first characters for a command and then by pressing the Tab key you can cycle through all the loaded aliases, system variables and core AutoCAD commands (or even the ones defined in AutoLISP) with in the current session of AutoCAD.

Smooth Transition with Zoom and Pan
Have you ever found yourself lost in a drawing after performing a zoom operation in AutoCAD? Really it doesn’t surprise me if you have had one of these moments from time to time, and if you are new to AutoCAD you might have this feeling more often than someone that has been using AutoCAD for years. To resolve the problem of here then there, Autodesk has introduced a feature called View Transition. This affects and changes the here and then there affect when doing a Zoom Window. It helps to keep your orientation in the drawing. For those that just want to get our work done fast and don’t mind this affect, there are options to adjust the transition rate and having the ability to disable the feature all together. Many of the Zoom and Pan commands take on this new behavior by default.

What am I selecting?
AutoCAD has some very slick ways of giving you feedback when you are selecting objects or are about to select objects. The first form is in a new feature called Roll-over Highlighting. Roll-over Highlighting is exactly what it sounds like. When you move the mouse over something it gets highlighted. The image below shows the new options to control this feature.


<Click on the proceeding image to open a larger version>

Along with the new Roll-over Highlighting you now get feedback in the form of a filled area when using ether a Window or Crossing operation. This allows you to quickly identify on screen what objects are going to be affected before they are even selected. In the image before the crossing operation is on the left with the green fill and the window operation is on the right with the blue fill. As you can see you can quickly identify what is in the selection window.



New Calculator Feature
Have you ever tried to use the Cal command in AutoCAD, if you have you sure might think to yourself that there has to be a much better way to work with a feature like this. Even though the Cal command is very powerful, you must say that it sure is dated though. Over the last couple of releases more and more people have been using applications outside of AutoCAD and then re-typing the value back into AutoCAD. Hopefully, those days are over with the new Quick Calc interface. Not that the new interface covers all needs and wants, it is a step in the right direction and will serve many peoples needs.



Using Values from QuickCalc in Text Fields
This is a nice feature and is a subset of the functionality of QuickCalc. This new feature allows you to use mathematical expressions or global constants in text boxes and dialog boxes. This feature is called CalcInput. For example, you could type =4*2.2567 in the Linetype Scale property in the Properties Palette and then press the END key to have it evaluated. After the END key is pressed the expression will be evaluated to 9.0268 and be placed into the field.