(See Image) Using Hatch to Create "Dashed" Pattern Fill in Rectangle/Piping

[awsmith95]

Hello,

I am finding it difficult to put into words what I am trying to achieve, so I will start off by showing an image of what I want to do:

I am currently working on piping diagrams, and in order to differentiate between pipes, both solid and dashed colours are used. At the moment, I am forced to draw the small lines (creating the rectangles within the pipe) and then fill each rectangle with the hatched colour. As I often have to resize these pipes, this strategy has proven to be very inefficient.

Ideally, I would be able to place it on a full pipe with corners/junctions (like in the picture) and it would be able to do the corners correctly, however I would be happy with just being able to do it on straight pipes as well.

I am using AutoCAD 2016.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you very much.

[Kent1Cooper]

Do you need the small lines creating the rectangular filled areas, or are they there only to give you areas to Hatch in?  If the goal is the blue dashed part, you can use Polylines with the EVENDASH linetype and appropriate width and linetype scale factor, which is what the blue parts are here:

There is a slight difference, in that although continuous Polylines with width form corners sharply, for some reason, non-continuous linetypes don't fill in the corner all the way.  But if the purpose is to differentiate pipe types or sizes or whatever in piping diagrams, that purpose would seem to be served even with this shortcoming.

[awsmith95]

The work I am doing involves updating existing piping diagrams, so I need to have it look the same as the rest of the drawing (shown in my original picture).

That looks pretty good, though! I am sure I could fix the corner issue, however I do need the small lines to be there.

I am almost able to get what I want using the AR-B816 hatch pattern (shown in the picture below) - except I am unable to alternate hatch colours. I would think that since there are hatch patterns which place the small lines on the drawing for me, that your strategy should be able to incorporate that somehow?

[awsmith95]

Also, where do I find the EVENDASH linetype? I can't find it anywhere when trying to load it into the linetype manager, and when I google "evendash linetype" the only result I get is another comment you made on a different post.

[Kent1Cooper]

---

@awsmith95 wrote:

Also, where do I find the EVENDASH linetype? I can't find it anywhere when trying to load it into the linetype manager, and when I google "evendash linetype" the only result I get is another comment you made on a different post.

---

I'm at my location with older AutoCAD and Architectural Desktop -- maybe it came with that overlay program and not in "vanilla" AutoCAD.  It's simple enough:

*EVENDASH,-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
A,.125,-.125

I know it's not something I created myself, because I would have done it in 1-unit, rather than 1/8-unit, dash and gap sizes, so I could get the dash/gap size I want directly with the linetype scale.  Since you don't already have it, I'd suggest this way instead of the above:

*EVENDASH,-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
A,1,-1

You can call it something else if you like.

[Kent1Cooper]

---

@awsmith95 wrote:

.... I do need the small lines to be there. ....

---

One possibility is to use 2 linetypes, one for the blue and one for the small cross-lines:

That uses a Line in ACROSS-4to1 linetype [below] for the white short lines, and a Polyline with 1/4-unit width in 1-unit EVENDASH for the blue, at the same linetype scale of 1 and with the same endpoints.  [The longer white top & bottom lines are an Mline.]

*ACROSS-4to1, |         |         |         |
A,0,["|",STANDARD,S=0.25,R=0.0,X=0,Y=-.125],-1
*EVENDASH,-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
A,0,-1,1

The ACROSS-4to1 definition counts on the STANDARD Text Style using the TXT.shx font, so if you have a different font that you don't want to change for STANDARD, make a new Style and use that instead, or do it with a Shape.

Note that the EVENDASH definition is a little different than before, starting with a 0 pen-down instead of a 1-unit pen-down, to match up with the other linetype's starting condition.

HOWEVER, at certain lengths [use them in a trial and do some stretching, etc.] the positions of the elements react differently between the two linetypes for some reason, so some dragging of the endpoint(s) of one or the other can be needed to get them to align.  But that may well be easier than trying to do it with Hatch patterns -- for instance Hatches would need to be done separately for different directions, whereas linetypes can follow the bends.