texupport

Typically, when a selection set includes various kinds of entities, their common features are visible in properties. When a contour is part of a selection set that also includes non-contours, then the color property isn’t available in properties.

 Exhibit A - Selection set of several types of entities.

Exhibit B - Contour added to selection set.

Workarounds: Use the properties toolbar
First Appeared: Land Desktop 2006
Status as of 2008: Still reproducible
Status as of 2009: (unknown)

After installing Land Desktop 2006 with Civil Design and / or Survey 2006 from a silent deployment, you receive a message stating that AutoCAD wasn’t properly installed when launching LDT as a second user.

Caveats: There is a hotfix (see below), but it will only work for new installations. To fix existing installations, you must first uninstall Civil Design and Survey and reinstall them with the repaired distribution.

First Appeared: Land Desktop 2006
Status as of 2006 SP1: Hotfix available
Status as of 2007: This particular cause of “not installed correctly” is assumed to be permanently fixed.

When MBUTTONPAN is set to 0 and you are using a CUSTOM.CUI as your main CUI, with LAND.CUI, EXPRESS.CUI, and CIVIL.CUI as partials, the middle button stops working immediately after using any Land Desktop command.

Workaround: In Config / Profiles, select the current profile and re-set it as current

First Appeared: Land Desktop 2006
Status as of 2006 SP1: Still reproducible
Status as of 2010: (unknown)

Some (but not all) of the blocks that shipped with Land Desktop 2006 have some associated lisp code that runs when they are inserted. It appears that much of this code predated the new interpretation of INSUNITS, and wasn’t updated to account for it. When using Autodesk’s own functions to insert any of these blocks, they will be inserted incorrectly scaled by a factor of 12 when using imperial units. One example is the graphic scale that is inserted via the symbol manager. A better example can be found in Civil Design. Go to Layouts / Sport Fields / Baseball and follow the prompts. If you have INSUNITS set to 2 (as Land Desktop seems to want to force), the baseball field will show up at 1/12th of its intended size.

From looking at the code in baseball.lsp, it appears that the function (ZZ_IN2CU 1) programmatically converts inches to feet, which, as of 2006, should already be handled by INSUNITS. The end result is that the block (which is drawn in architectural units) gets scaled by 1/12 two times – once by Land Desktop (baseball.lsp), and once by AutoCAD (INSUNITS).

Workarounds: Without acknowledging the underlying problem, Autodesk released a very poor workaround. Another workaround might be for you to try to force a semi unitless platform by setting INSUNITSDEFSOURCE and INSUNITEDEFTARGET to 0 for your system. Then you can set INSUNITS to 0 in all of your drawings by putting something like the following code in your acaddoc.lsp.

(if (not (zerop (getvar "insunits")))  (setvar "insunits" 0))

(You might have to tweak this a bit to suit your needs. In fact, I keep ours in a common s::startup function.) Keep in mind, however, that Land Desktop itself tries to set INSUNITS to the value that corresponds to the unit type that you select in PROJECTS / DRAWING SETUP.

First Appeared: Land Desktop 2006
Status as of 2006 SP1: Still reproducible
Status as of 2007: This appears to be corrected. Tough luck, 2006 users.

Note: The INSUNITS issue with Land Desktop 2006 was undoubtedly a true bug, which like most true bugs, was never acknowledged on Autodesk’s knowledge base. Despite the fact that this bug was corrected in LDT 2007, the new (2006+) interpretation of INSUNITS is still very much a nuisance in all versions of AutoCAD. Unfortunately, at this point, this feature is probably considered working as designed. The workarounds described above can still be used with all versions of AutoCAD to come close to replicating the old unitless system.

When listing points (Points > List Points), it can take several minutes to populate the points list.

Workarounds: If you have maximized or otherwise resized your points window, stretching it back to its original size causes the points list to populate as fast as before.

First Appeared: Land Desktop 3
Status as of 2006: Still reproducible
Status as of 2006 SP1: (status unknown / pending feedback)
Status as of 2010: (unknown)

When “automatically save workspace changes” is turned on, ACAD.CUI is saved every time you close AutoCAD, regardless of whether or not you made any changes to your workspace. At the next startup, since AutoCAD.CUI holds a newer filedate, the application needlessly recompiles ACAD.MNR, adding a little more time to a startup process that is already slow enough.

In all fairness, this may not be a true bug, but rather considered “working as desiged.” Even so, its indicative of the lazy, rushed bloat ware that we’ve been subjected to for several years so it is included in this list.

First Appeared: AutoCAD 2006
Status as of 2008: Still reproducible
Status as of 2010: (unknown)

The new “partial preview” like icon seems to indicate incorrect image positioning when plotting named model space views.

For an example, enter (or script) these commands:

_vscurrent
2
plan
w
ucs
w
setvar
osnapcoord
1
._rectangle
1380000,445000
1380010,445007.50
._-VIEW
w
MYVIEW
1380000,445000
1380010,445007.50
._zoom
 e

Then, in the plot dialog box notice how the “partial preview” shifts when switching between plotting extents and plotting MYVIEW.

Workaround: Use “full” preview when plotting named views
First Appeared: AutoCAD 2006
Status as of 2008: Still reproducible
Status as of 2009: (unknown)

Commands such as BHATCH and XREF fail to work after running multiple plots when “plotting to file.” This is not related to the CMDDIA variable.

Workarounds: Shutdown and restart
First Appeared: AutoCAD 2006
Status as of 2007: Cursory testing unable to reproduce error. Touch luck 2006 customers.

On some systems, LWDISPLAY, which is typically a DWG-stored variable, automatically gets set to 1 in every file that is opened. Like other CAD Managers, I’ve seen this on only a handful of systems, but on those affected systems it is consistent. It’s not a bug in the profile, nor is it introduced anywhere in the custom startups (acad.lsp, acaddoc.lsp, .mnl).

Workarounds: Add the following to your acaddoc.lsp:

(if (eq (getvar "lwdisplay") 1)(setvar "lwdisplay" 0))

Alternately, you can right click on the LWT icon on the status bar, and adjust the display scale to “minimum” on the affected systems.

First Appeared: AutoCAD 2006
Status as of 2006 SP1: Still evident
Status as of 2007: Cursory testing is unable to reproduce bug. Tough luck 2006 customers.

When using VBA to iterate through entities within any block (including modelspace and paperspace), the first time an RTEXT entity is encountered, an error is produced. Whats worse is that this error cant be trapped with “on error resume next.”

For example:

Sub RtextError()
Dim oEnt As AcadEntity
Dim oBlock As AcadBlock
For Each oBlock In ThisDrawing.Blocks
If Not oBlock.IsXRef Then
For Each oEnt In oBlock
Debug.Print oEnt.ObjectName ***
Next oEnt
End If
Next oBlock
End Sub

*** when this line encounters an RTEXT entity, the following error occurs: Run-time error -2147221231 ClassFactory cannot supply requested class

Workarounds: None known
First Appeared: AutoCAD 2006
Status as of 2006 SP1: Still evident
Status as of 2007: Fixed. Tough luck, 2006 users.

When 2005 was released, we were introduced to a new property for MTEXT entities: background mask. Unfortunately, background masking only works when output devices are set to “lines overwrite.” From an OOP point of view, its easy to guess why it works the way it does out of the box. From a users point of view, however, it’s unacceptable in many situations.

Workarounds: Using the Express Tools TEXTMASK / WIPEOUT entities, just like you had to in 2000-2004
First Appeared: AutoCAD 2005
Status as of 2008: Still reproducible
Status as of 2009: Still reproducible
Status as of 2010: Still reproducible

The new variable HPGAPTOL was supposed to allow the user to specify the maximum size of gaps that can be ignored when creating a hatch. It wowed the crowd in the 2005 demonstration that I went to. In practice, the variable setting rarely works.

Workarounds: Some users have reported that selecting objects (rather than internal points) yields better results. Others have stated that no segment of the boundary can be shorter than the value of HPGAPTOL. Even when using these techniques, many users are unable to produce consistent results.

First Appeared: AutoCAD 2005
Status as of 2008: Still reproducible
Status as of 2009: Still reproducible
Status as of 2010: Seems to have gotten better.

After using BHATCH to create hatches against XREFfed entities, LAYERP may distort the hatch boundary.

Exhibit A – Xref or block has been inserted 

Exhibit B – One of the referenced layers is frozen 

Exhibit C – Associative bhatch

Exhibit D - LAYERP has been run
 

Workarounds: Use non-associative hatches under these conditions or thaw your layers using LAYTHW, -LAYER or LAYER
First Appeared: AutoCAD 2002
Status as of 2006 SP1: Still reproducible
Status as of 2007: (unknown – please email with any info)
Status as of 2008: Fixed

In AutoCAD 2006, if you use a main CUI with one or more partials, as well as an enterprise CUI with one or more partials, then your toolbars may not stay in place when you start AutoCAD, even when youve saved then in a workspace. It appears that, at startup, the toolbars are placed according to the order that the CUI files are loaded rather than the layout that you saved in your workspace.

Workarounds: If you’re using AutoCAD 2006, resetting the WSCURRENT system variable will restore the toolbar locations. The following code placed into your acad.lsp file should help.

(SETVAR "wscurrent" (GETVAR "wscurrent"))

If you’re using 2000-2002, see this article for an Autodesk-suggested workaround.

First Appeared: AutoCAD 2000
Status as of 2006 SP1: Still reproducible
Status as of 2007: (unknown)
Status as of 2008: (unknown)
Status as of 2009: (unknown)