Pan orthoganally within viewport without affecting viewport scale (workaround)

[xiandavis]

Let me know if you know a better way:

Say you have a viewport(s) and you want to fine tune where it is viewing in model space, but without accidentally zooming in/out with your mouse, affecting the original scale of the viewport.

1. Start by getting the object(s) desired roughly within the viewport set to desired scale, not exactly where objects ultimately should be.
2. Unlock your viewport(s) from the properties panel.
3. For me, it helped to have an additional viewport that you did not care if it's scale was affected or not (you can even lock this viewport if not changing its view); from paperspace, start either by typing ms for modelspace, or double-clicking inside this 'dummy' viewport to make it active.
4. Next, cycle the 'active' viewport through the available viewports by repeatedly typing ctrl-R on your keyboard (this is normally used to activate a smaller viewport that is covered within a larger viewport, not relevant to this problem/solution).
5. From the keyboard, enter -p for pan, ortho. Using the mouse you can now click anywhere in the active viewport to indicate your base point and direction of shift, without affecting the scale. Type how many units to shift in the direction you just indicated with your mouse, hit Enter key.
6. With the viewport still active, click ctrl-R to deactivate it. You have now entered and exited the viewport without the mouse, and the mouse data entered when the viewport was active was limited to the orthogonal shift direction.
7. Lock your viewport(s).
8. Delete additional 'dummy' viewport if you made one.

Alternatively, you can simply resize viewport borders from paper space without ever activating model space. Align objects within them using your osnaps, then realign their viewport borders with each other (used to use MVSETUP for this, but I believe the command is now deprecated).

[cadffm]

Hi,

"dummy' viewport", really?

It sounds like you have unusually frequent problems with the hardware/drivers or the operation of the mouse.
There is no other way I can explain the great fear that can be seen in this!?

>"start either by typing ms for modelspace, or double-clicking inside this 'dummy' viewport to make it active."

Or push the [Model/Paper] Button in your Statusbar.

-

The same story short:

Inside a viewport, use command -PAN

You are using lock/unlock, that's a very good way.

To make it easier to lock/unlock, create macro for one click usage.

(Or by Lisp or any other API)

Familiar with writing menu macros?

[tramber]

MVSETUP still helps me, sometimes 😎. What would you like more ?

You said you use -P (or -PAN) command.

Did you know that you can also use SHIFT while mouse panning ? It is not a fine tune trick, ok.

[ВeekeeCZ]

-PAN is good if you need to move it by a specific value.

[pendean]

@xiandavis Are you just looking for these macros/buttons tucked away in CUI command by chance (and do you want LISP versions if you're not a buttons fan?) 

[xiandavis · Accepted solution]

Interesting. I haven’t done customization. Thank you for the visual aid.