Opening Mutilple Drawings in IntelliCAD 98

Opening Multiple Drawings in IntelliCAD

Tips & Techniques

IntelliCAD 98, MDS, multiple, document,drawing, interface

The multiple document (drawing) interface (MDI) supported by IntelliCAD has been a major feature since the first release. It really is a great time saver and allows you to perform tasks that would be extremely tedious, if not impossible to do without MDI.

If you've never used a product with a multiple document interface or are not quite sure how this might apply in a CAD situation then this document will give you a little insight.

IntelliCAD 98 allows you to open more than one drawing simultaneously in a single IntelliCAD session. While each drawing consumes memory resources, only one instance of IntelliCAD is running, which means that the system resources required to achieve this facility are much reduced.

The multiple document interface makes it easier than ever to share information between drawing files.

Having multiple drawings open has the following benefits:

You can view several drawings at the same time
You can easily copy entities from one drawing to another
You can copy non-graphic information such as layers, linetypes, text and dimension styles between drawings

To copy graphic data between drawings, select the entities you want to copy and click Edit > Copy (or Ctrl-C, or use the copy tool on the standard toolbar, or type copyclip). Move to the destination drawing and click Edit > Paste (or Ctrl-V, or use the paste tool on the standard toolbar, or type pasteclip).

Copying non-graphic information between drawings is done through the Drawing Explorer. As the illustration belows shows each open drawing is accessible through Drawing Explorer. Information you want to transfer can be selected and copied from a section in one drawing (use the menu, shortcut keys, toolbar or right click) and then pasted to the corresponding section in another drawing. Anything listed in Drawing Explorer can be transferred in this way.

Drawing Explorer manages non-graphic information in each drawing open in IntelliCAD 98.

From the operational aspect:

You can get more drawings on the screen per megabyte of system memory
You can overlap, tile and minimize drawing windows at will

Drawings don't have to be tiled on the screen to be useful. Eeach drawing can be full screen for best display. Just use Ctrl-Tab to move between them.

There is a series of special commands in IntelliCAD specifically to control drawing windows. These commands are listed in the table below.

Command	Action
VPORTS	Spits the current view into two, three or four tiled viewports
WCASCADE	Cascades (overlaps) all open windows
WCLOASEALL	Closes all windows (and implicitly all drawings)
WHTILE	Tiles all windows horizontally
WIARRANGE	Arranges window icons
WOPEN	Opens another window of the current drawing
WVTILE	Tiles all windows vertically

Tell a friend
about this
page