| Article IntelliCAD,
Drawing Explorer, Windows, Office 97 |
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| By extending a powerful Windows
metaphor, Drawing Explorer lets you do things AutoCAD users have only dreamed about. By now, you probably know that IntelliCAD®
98 is the first Windows CAD program to not only use AutoCAD® DWG files as its
own native file format but to also support command line entry of most AutoCAD commands and
provide compatibility with most other AutoCAD file formats (such as AutoLISP®,
menus, linetypes, hatch patterns, and text fonts). But IntelliCAD doesn’t stop there.
IntelliCAD extends its power by allowing you to open multiple drawing files and work with
them in true Windows fashion. IntelliCAD’s Windows-compatibility is second to none,
and nowhere else is this more evident than in the program’s powerful Drawing Explorer™.
By extending the increasingly familiar Windows Explorer
metaphor, IntelliCAD’s Drawing Explorer provides a powerful and convenient way to
maintain and manage many of the features and settings of your drawings. You can use the
Drawing Explorer to manage layers, linetypes, text styles, coordinate systems, named
views, and blocks within the current drawing or to copy any of this information between
drawings.
Consistent Windows Interface
The Drawing Explorer opens in its own window
and is available from both the Settings menu and via a number of toolbar buttons. The
Drawing Explorer window itself consists of a menu and two moveable and dockable toolbars
above two panes. The left pane, the Elements pane, shows an outline view containing the
name of every drawing currently open along with the six elements (layers, linetypes,
styles, coordinate systems, views, and blocks) that you can control in each drawing. If
more than one drawing is open, you can collapse or expand the element outline for a given
drawing by clicking on the plus (+) or minus (-) sign adjacent to the drawing name. The
right-hand pane, the settings pane, shows the named settings for the element selected in
the left-hand pane.
The Drawing Explorer window contains a menu, two moveable and dockable
toolbars, and the Elements and Settings pane.
You can view the current settings for any element type in any open drawing.
If you’ve worked at all with Windows Explorer or other
Microsoft Office 97-compliant software, you will feel immediately at ease with the Drawing
Explorer. Everything about it works as you expect. Double-clicking any item in the
settings pane makes it the current item. For example, to select the current layer, you
just double-click the layer name. Of course, you can also highlight the layer name and
then either click the Current button or select Edit > Current from the pull-down menu,
but both of these methods require additional steps. Double-clicking is much faster and
immediately becomes second nature.
You’ll also find ample opportunity to
use the right mouse button. Like other modern Windows applications, clicking the right mouse button
displays a shortcut menu. In the case of IntelliCAD’s Drawing Explorer, this is the
fastest way to copy, paste, delete, rename, or modify any drawing setting. Say for example
you need to change the color associated with a particular layer. You simply select that
layer in the layer settings list, right-click to display the shortcut menu, and select
properties. Again, you can also select the layer and then click the Properties button or
select Edit > Properties from the pull-down menu. Either way, IntelliCAD immediately
displays a properties dialog box for the selected layer, in which you can change the
color, linetype, or visibility setting.
The Drawing Explorer properties dialog box lets
you change the properties of any selected setting.
You can quickly change any of the selected text style settings.
If all you want to do is turn layers on or off, or freeze or
thaw them, however, you’ll find it much faster to select them in the layer settings
list, and then click the appropriate button on the Drawing Explorer toolbar. To create a
new layer, you just click the New button. IntelliCAD adds a new layer to the list,
initially naming it NewLayer1. You then type the actual layer name and use the Properties
dialog box to make any necessary changes to the layer’s color, linetype, or
visibility.
The exact same procedures work with all of the other
elements, with appropriate functions for the particular type of element. For example, when
you add a new linetype, the Drawing Explorer presents a dialog box allowing you to load a
linetype from any AutoCAD-compatible linetype library file. When creating a new text font,
the Drawing Explorer displays a standard File dialog box from which you can select the
font file.
You can quickly change the color or linetype associated with any
layer using the Drawing Explorer’s Layer properties dialog box.
Working With Blocks
When it comes time to work with blocks and
external references, the Drawing Explorer provides a number of features you won’t
find in AutoCAD. The Images view lets you see thumbnail images of all the blocks and
external references in a particular drawing while the Details view displays block and
external reference names. This view also shows the complete path for external references
along with the number of instances of each block or external reference in the drawing.
When displaying the blocks settings, additional tools become active, enabling you to
insert an instance of a block or external reference, attach a new drawing as an external
reference, or save a selected block as an independent drawing file. But the Drawing
Explorer’s cut-and-paste capabilities may eliminate the need to save blocks
independently out to disk.
Working with blocks is particularly easy thanks to the Drawing
Explorer.
You can view thumbnail images of all the blocks in the drawing and click on the
appropriate toolbar button to insert a block or external reference.
Cut and Paste Anything
By putting a consistent interface on many
common operations, the Drawing Explorer serves to make IntelliCAD much easier to use. But
the Drawing Explorer’s real power becomes apparent when you have more than one
drawing open. Then, you can use standard Windows cut-and-paste capabilities to quickly
duplicate settings from one drawing to another. Say for instance that you’ve created
several blocks which you’d like to reuse in another drawing. In AutoCAD, you’d
need to save these blocks as individual files using the WBLOCK command. But with
IntelliCAD, thanks to the Drawing Explorer, you can just copy the blocks from the block
settings pane of the first drawing and paste them into the block settings pane of the
second. You can do the same thing with layers, and all the settings associated with those
layers are copied from the source drawing to the target.
These types of operations are impossible in AutoCAD and
difficult, if not impossible, with any other CAD system currently available. By extending
upon a simple Windows metaphor, IntelliCAD offers incredible power and flexibility while
actually eliminating the need to use older AutoCAD commands. Once you learn what you can
do with the Drawing Explorer, you’ll wonder how you ever worked in a CAD program
without it.
David Cohn |
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