Superman

I’ve been keeping a “Tech Notes” document for about 15 years, it lives on my desktop. I use it to keep track of random thoughts – random things I run across, random things I learn. every once in a while I take a few minutes to read through it. Sometimes I wonder if I haven’t forgotten more than I know:

TEXTTOFRONT
Brings all text and dimensions to the front of all the other objects in a drawing.

LEGACYCTRLPICK
Specifies the keys for selection cycling and the behavior for CTRL + left-click.

Registry Key: VAULTSYSTEMPASSWORD
SuperMan769400006!
I’ll be honest with you, I find this highly interesting.

ANNOTATIVEDWG
When set to “1″ Specifies that a drawing will behave as an annotative block when inserted into another drawing.

LAYLOCKFADECTL
Controls the fade percentage between 0 and 90 when you lock a layer.

SHOWDRAWINGTIPS
SHOWDRAWINGTIPSFULL

Move your cursor in profile, watch it appear in plan. SHOWDRAWINGTIPS works for a single viewport only, SHOWDRAWINGTIPSFULL works in several.

LAYEREVAL = 0
LAYERNOTIFY = 0
Just do it.

ZZSUPON
Not available in Civil 3D, but available in Land Desktop. ZZSUPON turns on tech support information. Commands used in LDT that normally remain hidden on the command will not be shown. Why is this useful? Civil Design doesn’t ship with toolbars. Turn on ZZSUPON, slect a Civil Design command from a menu, copy and past the command displayed on the commandline, add place ^c^c^c^p before the command, and ;ldd after the command

(ENTDEL(HANDENT “HANDLE”))
(where HANDLE would be the handle reported
as a multiply owned object, i.e. “141B”)

Getting an error message about multiply owned object and then a handle designation? Find and delete the object by typing the above on the command line. Warning, you’ll likely lose a style or two as well.

TASKBAR
Set the variable to 1 and your open drawings will display across the Windows status bar.

S
Using the treeline linetype, draw a rectangle, the corners will appear odd. Open the linetype file (acad.lin) change the A at the beginning of the second line
to an S as shown below:

*TREELINE_R, Tree Line right side
S,0,-.13,[TREE,AECCLAND,s=.13,r=180],-.12

ConvertLineworkToMaskBlock
Mask a Civil 3D object.

CLASSICXREF & CLASSICIMAGE
Self-explanatory

ZOOMWHEEL
Do you want to roll the wheel forward, or backward, to zoom?

NCOPY
Surprisingly little known “nested copy” command. Copy an object through an x’ref.

CHSPACE
Move an object from model space to paper space or visa versa.

FLATSHOT
The name itself is cool. Creates a 2D representation of all 3D objects in the current view.

LAYDEL
The single layer in Civil 3D that just won’t die? LAYDEL.

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Comments

5 Responses to “Superman”
  1. brian says:

    This is good. I recently did a training session for my company hitting some of the lesser known commands in autocad and civil 3d and hit many of these. I was shocked when I saw the linetype with the ‘S’ alignment type. This is completely undocumented to my knowledge.

  2. Josh Nelson says:

    Thanks for the good info. However, I don’t agree with your “LAYEREVAL” and “LAYERNOTIFY” settings of 0. If you work on drawings where you are the only one working on them, the “0″ might be best. But these two settings are very helpful when you have multiple people and multiple departments working on a project. Haven’t you ever plotted something and a new object shows up that you hadn’t anticipated in your plot because someone added a layer to one of your xrefs? I don’t think everyone should do as you and Nike say “Just Do It”.

  3. Josh Nelson says:

    Okay – so I found the superman password and the weakerman password but what about the “ServicePassword” that is set to “Padnammunhoy467″? I wonder if there is any significance to “Padnammunhoy”???

  4. Scott says:

    Hi Josh,

    We were all such fans of LAYERNOTIFY and LAYEREVAL that Autodesk turned turned them off by default in AutoCAD 2009.

  5. Neyton says:

    Very cool your blog!
    When you can, visit my too!
    Http://tbn2.blogspot.com/
    Sorry for my English, translated with google, hehehe

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