Time off

Just wanted to let everyone know I haven't abandoned the blog. I took a few days to go visit our new Grandson. I'm now on a job site, but will be back later in the week & hope to have more information soon.

I've recieved requests for information for beginners & for using RD with the Civil Series of products from Autodesk. I'm not sure how much I can do with the Land Desktop & other programs, since my experience is with what Autodesk calls vanilla AutoCAD. I will try to help with those questions as much as I can, but may have to do some research to see what I can find.

Thank you again for your interest in my work with Raster Design. Keep the questions & comments coming & I'll do my best to publish information you can use.

Locating RD Options

Hey everyone. I'm getting great feedback. Thank you for your time & interest. It has been brought to my attention that I didn't mention one little detail. It's the details that can get ya. Keep the feedback coming to help me make this a better site for everyone.

To access the Options dialog, go to the Image pulldown & look toward the bottom of the list.

Options - Load Menu on RD startup

Under the Startup Options in User Preferences, it asks if you want to Load menu on Raster Design Startup. If you deselect this, it is supposed to not show the pulldown menu for RD. If that happens & you decide that was not what you had in mind, you can type in menuload to get the menu back where it belongs.

Options - shift + left click

Have you ever loaded Raster design only to discover your shift+left click no longer works? If so, you can change that by going to the Raster Design Options box. The Mouse Settings in the User Preferences tab will take care of it. The advantage to having that little box checked is that you can select an image from inside the image frame, without zooming out, so it's a trade-off. I hope Autodesk will make a keyboard shortcut to make it easier to toggle this setting on & off since I change that setting frequently for different projects. If it happens, I'll post an update.

AutoCAD Animation

I know.... I said I would line this out for Raster Design, but some AutoCAD stuff affects how RD works & looks, so I thought I would get some of that out of the way early. AutoCAD has a new feature that is pretty neat for visual effects. Some people love it, & some think it slows things down too much. You can set preferences by typing vtoptions in the command line. It will give you a dialog box which looks like:
It's something worth playing with to see how it works & what it can do for you.

Finding Express Tools

This tip doesn't really pertain to Raster Design, but to AutoCAD.

I've been seeing quite a few posts on newsgroups about loading the programs, but the Express Tools don't show up. If you are having trouble finding these, as well, type in MENULOAD & select Express Tools.

Image Frames

This has been making big news for people working with images in AutoCAD. It's one of my favorite new features, so thought it should be my first post.

When working with images, & you want to do something with the whole image, the image frame has to be turned on. In the past, if you want to print an image without the frame, you had to toggle it off, then back on to do edits. Problem was that if you forgot to turn it off, you had it on your prints. Now, you can set imageframe to 2 & it shows on the monitor, but not on the prints. The best of both worlds. To make sure it's set on new drawings, I save that as part of my qnew drawing template.

Getting Started

This is an effort to help anyone new to Raster Design. When I started using this program, it was called CAD Overlay. At the time, it was an almost unheard of program in this area & finding help or information was not easy. I hope I can make learning this program easier for others.