Autodesk is closed this week for Thanksgiving, so the blog is taking some time off too. It'll be nice to have a bit of a lull before the week-long high-speed CAD-mania that is Autodesk University.

A few final reminders before I sign off for the week:

• If you'll be in Vegas with us, stop by the AutoCAD booth and say hi. (If the exhibit hall is open, odds are pretty good that I'll be there.)
• If you can't come to Vegas, don't forget to check for an AU Extension near you.
• And if neither of the above work out, it's not too late to register for AUv to get access to all kinds of live and recorded content, both during the conference and throughout the year.

I also don't know how much I'll be blogging during AU (although I'll try), but I will be tweeting regularly. Most of my tweets in the past have been links to blog posts, so AU will be my first foray into more real-time updates. We'll see how it goes. If you want to follow the experiment, you can find me at twitter.com/katemorrical.

Next stop, AU!

This is another post inspired by a frequent discussion-group topic. The scenario is that someone double-clicks inside an unlocked viewport and suddenly the view zooms to extents. Probably not what you had in mind.

Like a lot of unexpected behaviors in AutoCAD LT, the fix is easy once you know where to look. In this case, it's the variable UCSFOLLOW. When it's set to 0, as it is by default, nothing happens to your view when you change the UCS -- i.e. when you go from layout coordinates to model space. But if it gets set to 1, a change in UCS automatically regenerates a plan view, and zooms to the extents of the drawing.

The only thing to remember is that each viewport has its own UCSFOLLOW setting. So if you have more than one viewport acting up, you need to set USCFOLLOW to 0 in each viewport. (That means double-click inside it and change the variable. Changing it in just model space or just a layout isn't enough.)

Locking a viewport also prevents this kind of view changes -- depending on your setup, that may be a viable alternative too.

I'm sure you've noticed that when you double-click on certain objects in your drawings, certain commands start. Double-clicking on text opens the text editor, double-clicking on a block opens the  the Attribute Editor or the Block Editor (if the block doesn't have attributes), etc.

But what if you don't like the default action? For example, double-clicking on a dimension launches the Properties palette by default. But I'm much more likely to be editing the dimension text than I am to be changing one of its properties. (Adding notes like TYP. or V.I.F. of course, NOT changing the default number!) So I'd rather that double-clicking on a dimension launched the text editor instead.

To change this, I'll go into the CUI, look for Double-Click Actions, right-click, and choose New.

I'll call the new action Dimension, and under Object Name, enter DIMENSION. This object name is the DXF name of the object -- fortunately, it usually corresponds to the object name as you know it.

Now, I need to add the command I want to my new action. To do this, I can search or browse the command list, then drag-and-drop the command onto the action. (Watch out -- you want "Text, Edit" or DDEDIT here. Dimension Text Edit and Mtext Edit will NOT give you the same results.)

That's it! Now, after you click OK, double-clicking a dimension will open its text for editing instead of opening the Properties palette. And of course, this method works for adding just about any action to any kind of object (although it helps your sanity if the two are related).