Do you work for a small business (300 people or fewer) in the US or Canada? Is your firm running outdated Autodesk software on old hardware? Would you like to change that?? (The old software/hardware part, not the small business part.)

Autodesk is searching for applicants for our next Technology Makeover—enter today on the AutoCAD Facebook page and you could win Autodesk Design Suite software and Lenovo ThinkStation workstations!

I bet there are a bunch of you out there who could use a new computer, so head over to the AutoCAD Facebook page and submit your story today. You have until February 23 to enter, but why wait?

Enter today, and YOU could be the next star of the Technology Makeover videos!

I've got a quasi-guest post for you today, courtesy of Paul Munford of The CAD Setter Out. ("Quasi" because I'm going to give you a link, not quote the whole thing.) Last week, after I mentioned using the Properties palette to modify text masks, Paul sent in a link to his in-depth exploration of the Properties palette.

My favorite tip was about undoing the changes you make with the palette:

If you make a lot of edits with the Properties palette, and then go back into AutoCAD and run the ‘undo’ command, all of your edits may undo at once. To undo one change at a time, remain with the Properties palette open, right click anywhere over the palette and choose ‘Undo’.

But there's plenty more where that came from–read the whole thing to brush up on all this palette can do!

After last week’s post on background masks for dimension objects, I poked around through my archives and realized I’ve never posted on regular text masks. I know I put it in a demo video, but I guess it never got its own post. Let’s fix that.

When you’re creating or editing multiline text, there’s a button the Formatting panel called Background Mask.

Click on it, and you’ll get a dialog box where you can set the offset factor and the fill color.

The offset factor, how far the mask extends beyond the text, is relative to the text height. A factor of 1 keeps the mask the same size as the text. A factor of 1.5 provides a border equal to half the text height all the way around. The maximum factor for the mask is 5.0.

For the fill color, you can either pick a standard color, or use the background color of the drawing, which basically means it’ll plot clear.

New in 2012, the values you choose when creating a mask for a *new* text object will be remembered for the next time you want to apply a mask. (Previously, they defaulted to 1.5 and red every time.)

The reason this only works for new text objects is that background masks are a property of the text. See?

 

So you have to actively set the variables for a new object before they’ll persist.

 

Ever have a dimension that’s blocking something in your drawing? It’s probably not something important, or you’d move the dimension, but what if you’re putting a dimension on an image, or over some contour lines where it’s hard to read?

To make your text stand out more clearly, you can enable a background mask or fill color in the dimension style. This setting is on the Text tab, and you can either specify an actual color or just use the background of your drawing.

Here’s what the dimension looks like after setting Fill Color to Background:

This setting is also controlled with the DIMTFILL and DIMTFILLCLR system variables. Setting them at the command line will apply an override to your current dimension style, so that new dimensions get the settings but existing dimensions remain unchanged. To update all dimensions, you can right-click on the “style overrides” in the Dimension Style list and choose “save to current style”.

You can also override the fill value for individual dimensions through the Text section of the Properties Palette.

It’s that time of year again, when well-meaning people make resolutions for the new year…and break them before Groundhog Day.

I don’t make many resolutions myself anymore, but this week on the AutoCAD Facebook page I’m putting up a few CAD tips related to the most popular of New Year’s resolutions.

So far we’ve had “lose weight” and “get in shape”—at least, drawing-wise.

What are your resolutions for 2012? (Please, don’t say 1920x1280.)