Without A Net

Contextual Array Ribbon Tab Tip

(Today's guest post comes courtesy of Autodesk Product Support Team Lead, Silvia Menon. Thanks, Silvia.)

As many of you may have noticed, there were some significant changes to the ARRAY command in AutoCAD 2012, which added a lot of new functionality like associative arrays, Array along a path, and more. This is well documented in the Help, and you can also look at a video that shows the new functions in the JTB World post, Associative Array in AutoCAD 2012.

One very handy feature is the contextual Array ribbon tab that lets you edit the parameters of an array after it was created.

Here is a little tip to get the Array ribbon tab to display automatically, right at the creation of your array, not just when you select an existing array:

1. Run the CUI command to open the CUI Editor
2. In the command list, search for the commands beginning with ARRAY

3. Select the desired command (Rectangular Array, Polar Array or Path Array) and modify the Macro to the one shown below:

   Rectangular Array (ARRAYRECT)
^C^C(command "arrayrect" PAUSE "" "1" "1" "X")(command "select" "single" "last")(sssetfirst nil (ssget "_p"))(princ)

   Polar Array (ARRAYPOLAR)
^C^C(command "arraypolar" PAUSE "" PAUSE "" "" "X")(command "select" "single" "last")(sssetfirst nil (ssget "_p"))(princ)

   Path Array (ARRAYPATH)
^C^C(command "arraypath" PAUSE "" PAUSE "1" "D" "X")(command "select" "single" "last")(sssetfirst nil (ssget "_p"))(princ)

4. Click OK to close the CUI Editor and save the changes.

Now, when you select the desired option of the Array command from the Ribbon or from a toolbar, it will convert the selected object to an associative array object and automatically select it, so that you can then enter the desired values for your Array in the ribbon.

(Please note: this will not impact the behavior of the ARRAY command when you enter it on the command line)

Enjoy!

New URLs for French and German AutoCAD Support Pages

You may not be aware of this but there are several, more "friendly", URLs you can use to directly access the Services & Support landing pages for many Autodesk products. For example:

AutoCAD:
http://www.autodesk.com/autocad-support

AutoCAD LT:
http://www.autodesk.com/autocadlt-support

AutoCAD for Mac:
http://www.autodesk.com/autocadformac-support

AutoCAD Suites:
http://www.autodesk.com/suites-support

There are many more for other products–I'm sure you can suss most of them out from these examples–and we recently added new URLs for direct access to the German and French AutoCAD Support landing pages:

AutoCAD - German:
http://www.autodesk.de/autocad-support

AutoCAD - French:
http://www.autodesk.fr/autocad-support

These links can make it quicker and easier to find a products support page rather than navigating through various links on www.autodesk.com/support. Also, when sending links to someone, this:

http://www.autodesk.com/autocad-support

…is much nicer than this:

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/index?siteID=123112&id=2714854&linkID=9240617

AutoCAD 2011 for Mac Update 3 Beta

I was on vacation and blissfully offline last week so I missed the announcement that AutoCAD 2011 for Mac Update 3 is now available in Beta (this may be old news by now but I promised I'd mention it here when it was released).

This Update introduces Lion support and resolves many of the issues currently experienced with AutoCAD 2011 for Mac running on Mac OS X Lion (10.7). Beta 1 of this update does still have some known issues so be sure and refer to the Beta readme before installing.

The project can be accessed in the AutoCAD Futures project.

All feedback should be provided in the "AutoCAD for Mac 2011 - Update 3" discussion forum.