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December 1999

Drawing Snap Lines

Here is a little tip to speed up drawing cleaning up.  It is a snap line.  A snap line is a line that shows up on the screen but not on the printed drawing.  It allows you to line up balloons, notes, or any draft entities that can be moved using the normal move command.  When an entity is moved near the snap line, it "snaps" to it.  The moved entity will change colors from red to violet when it is attached to the snap line.  Using the snap line, balloons can be lined up in a perfect straight line.  No more eyeballing to try to get them straight.  Figure 1 shows several balloons lined up on two snap lines.
 

Figure 1, December 1999
Figure 1

Snap lines can be assigned to a view, a datum plane or any geometry edge and then move with that view.  A snap line can be moved by the normal move command, or it can be moved using Modify > Snap Line.  The great thing is that when the snap line is moved, all the entities aligned to it move with it.

To create a snap line pick Create > Snap Line and follow the prompts.  The units for placement are in millimeters no matter what the drawing units are so you will need to pick an offset value like 10 or 50.  Play around with different attachments.  Now it is easy to align draft entities and have them all move together.

We wish you a Very Merry Christmas !!

And a Wonderful New Millennium.

 

Here is a great comment that came later ...

Eric Heins wrote:  "I am a fan of snap lines.  ... Another good aspect is ... Any draft item 'on' a snap line is automatically attached to the snap line's view.  This can be useful for otherwise 'loose' draft items such as free pieces of text, revision symbols, etc.  It eliminates the step of manually attaching them to a view."  Be careful, however, because "sometimes entities try to snap onto a snap line in another view.  If left that way it becomes attached to the other view.  This can be avoided by simply paying attention to placement (the draft item does become highlighted when it will 'snap')."

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