Hatching Drawings.......New to Auto Cad....

[dmortimore]

I am trying to hatch drawings for a carpet project. I think I am doing it correctly but when I hit " enter", the screen goes white and at the top it tells me, Auto Cad 2012-( Hatching dwg.) ( Not Responding)....Ideas on what I am doing wrong?

[dbroad]

Hatching can be very finicky, especially if you have a dense hatch pattern and lots of potential boundary objects.  You might create a group from objects that you think form a closed boundary and then use the select objects option.

Please note that hatching drawings that contain xrefs and AEC objects are very problematic.  Hatching works best with AutoCAD objects.

There are other means of hatching AEC object besides using the hatch command.  Space objects and AECPolygons have hatch associated with them.

To simplify, try drawing separator lines on a non-plotting layer to divide your drawing into into sectors and then hatch within those.  

The boundary command is a precursor for the hatch command.  Try boundary using the same pick point locations before hatching.  If it takes a long time to find the boundaries, try another tack.

[FitzUS]

Basically AutoCAD is trying to calculate the boundary and fill it with the hatch pattern. It can take several minutes if the drawing is complex. dbroad explains that problem above

It can also happen because of the hatch pattern selected and the scale of the drawing will create very dense hatches. For some reason AutoCAD defaults to ANSI31 which are very closely spaced lines, more appropriate for mechanical parts, not carpet plans.

Change your hatch pattern to SOLID or User defined with a spacing of 6". That will hatch more quickly.