The intended audience is first year VTU engg students but others also might find it useful.
- Use Ctrl + Left Click + Drag to copy and Release Mouse to paste any element. This is very useful to copy text(labels).
- Use the move command to move complex elements rather than just dragging them. The advantage of using move is you can select the required point of selected complex figure and use IntelliSketch to determine the destination instead of relying totally on your sight which is also error prone. Also you can copy instead of moving by toggling Move- copy button on top left corner of the toolbar that appears.
- You can place common elements like xy-line on background sheet rather than repeating the same for all sheets.
- To get special characters like ß , φ, º you can use any one of the following approach
- Use the character map and select "Symbol" font. You can select the required symbol, copy and paste it.
- Use Symbol font for text box itself where you get ß for B..
- Discover the required character in the font of your choice in Character Map. In the bottom of that dialog you can see the code of that character in the form U+0186. This is unicode of that character in hexadecimal. Convert it to decimal using calculator. (You might have to go to View menu and select Scientific in the calculator.) Once you get to know this code you can type it by doing Alt + Decimal code. Eg try Alt + 0186 to get degree symbol.
- Did you know you could do all drawing in normal scale and reduce it isometric in one shot ? This is awesome which will save lot of time spent on keystrokes. Do the drawing in normal scale i.e without any .8165*no for dimension. Now select the drawing , click scale (available in toolbuttons listbox where move,rotate is present). Enter 0.8165 and press "Enter". Boom! You got the isometric! This is faster , elegant and less error prone (imagine you forget .8165*no for any one of elements :o)
- You can get a cocentroidal plane inside itself(for eg 30mm pentagon inside 60mm pentagon) using offset command. It might be useful for isometric projections.
- The last one is very handy when doing prisms, cylinders, frustum of cones.. Consider an example of frustum of cone whose base diameter is 60mm and top face diameter 30 mm of some height. When you are done with base, select the base - go to scale and give 0.5. Wait! Before you type 0.5, toggle scale -copy button on top left of toolbar that appears after selecting scale option so that you get a copy instead of changing the original. Now type 0.5 and you get the top face without any work! Place it appropriately using move command.
Disclaimer: The above, though works for me and my friends, might not work for you. I am not responsible in any way if it doesn't work appropriately for you or if it causes any undesirable side-effects.
