Drafting Techniques

[#1]

Hello,

Anyone know of a way to trim-out a floor plan in a pdf, and all the other stuff masks out.

I do not think there is an irrregular boundary setting - or is there?

I remember trimming an agency's logo once a long time ago, by tracing and closing the polygon.  Can't remeber what it was.

The logo remained while the rest of the image disappeared.

It may have been a raster image.  Was that a separate command from imageclip?

[#2]

PDFCLIP ?

Or right click the PDF, then PDF Clip

One of the options is "Select Boundary". So draw a closed polyline and select that as your boundary

[#3]

Is there a way to make the new boundary an irregular (many sides, many vertices) other than a rectangular boundary (crop box)?

I would like to be able to trace around a many sided object.

A few years back I used a command to trace around an image of a star shaped shield.

The sheild remained visible, while the rest of the person's business card was cropped out of view.

I cant remember what that command is!

[#4 · Accepted solution]

Like I said... Draw a polyline (As many sides as you want) invoke the PDFCLIP command and pick the "Select Boundary"

[#5]

oh, now I get it!  thanks

[#6]

Exercuse me, what is your autocad version?

[#7]

2013

[#8]

Here's another trick I can't lay claim to, regarding those nasty versions of PDFs -- the ones you can't snap to; the ones that sometimes are scaled differently in the y direction from the x direction.

If this is the case, first scale it the closest you can get in the x-direction. Second, make it a block (but make sure you can scale the y-direction separately from the x-direction. Make it's insertion point at one corner (of the building for example).

Next, scale it so the y-direction is as close as possible to correct. Then read that scale in the Properties Manager, and undo the scale action.

Now, highlight the block again and in the Properties Manager, override the y-direction scale factor with the one you previously observed. The x-direction will remain its original (correct) scale while the y-direction will now be corrected to the proper scale. In other words, x and z have a scale of 1.0000, while y now has a scale of whatever it was you observed and entered.

Yes you can nail down the y first then scale the x second if you like. And No never explode the block or it will lose the proper proportions.

Once you have done this, consider using this particular drawing for PDFs only, and XREF it as an overlay into the next drawing up, and then XREF that into the parent drawing. This practice will effectively treat the PDFs as overlays, which then will not clutter up the XREF Manager in the parent drawing :-)