Hatching and "select" time?

[pkolarik]

Now, Autocad has done this for as long as I can remember, and I've always wondered why (or if there's a way to turn this "feature" off).

Let's say you're in a floor plan drawing and you want to hatch an area using the "pick interior point" option. If you're zoomed out far enough to have alot of other objects on the screen, Autocad feels the need to mull over (and highlight alot of them) all the objects visible on-screen before actually hatching the selection area (even if that selection area has nothing to do with the other objects other than being in the same dwg and on-screen at the time of selection).

Alot of our drawing utilize cad files from equipment manufacturers in Germany (and other places) who have a *ton* of geometry in their files.

However, if you zoom in and pan around just right to get those other items off the edge of your screen prior to selecting your area to be hatched, the hatch command executes instantaneously.

Is there a way to turn off Autocad's apparent need to look at all the surrounding geometry during the hatch command?

Why does it even have to do this in the first place?

Most times, if I catch it right away, I can hit the escape key and usually in a minute or two it cancels the command. But the longer the hatch command runs before I hit escape, the longer it takes to cancel... if it ever cancels. (currently my computer has been churning on this particular hatch attempt for about 10  minutes as I write this due to *one* piece of equipment on the edge of my screen that was small enough that I thought it wouldn't be an issue..........looks like a three-key kill of Autocad is in my immediate future....)

Thanks!

[pendean]

"....Is there a way to turn off Autocad's apparent need to look at all the surrounding geometry during the hatch command?..."

Yes, freeze the other irrelevant layers first. Otherwise, no: if you ask AutoCAD for find the boundary for you, it does so by auditing everything on screen just like you asked it to do to ensure it's catching any and all overlaps and other items that affect the final result. If you have a boundary, pick it, always a better solution.

AutoCAD does not "see" what you see as a boundary, it has to look for it. Beware what you ask software to do for you without specific detailed user instructions, remember WOPR and HAL9000 🙂

[pkolarik]

Usually I do turn off the offending layers first, but this time I didn't because it was a pretty small piece of equipment (compared to the larger ones that I *know* cause problems) and I was hopeful it wouldn't cause issues.

I still think it's silly that autocad has to check things that are great distances away from the bounday just because it's visible on the screen... now that we can (finally) run the hatch command successfully to hatch areas that aren't 100% on-screen I would have thought the 'Deskers would have changed that as well..... oh well.

Heh.. WOPR.... "Would you like to play a game?"

"Global Thermonuclear War"....