AutoCAD Tip: Tangent lines and currves.

One ability that AutoCAD has had from it's inception is the ability to draw
consecutive tangent lines and curves. By consecutive I mean that the
entities must be drawn one after the other.

To draw a curve tangent to a line. First draw the line. Then start the arc
command. When asked to Specify the start point of the arc hit Enter. You
will now be drawing an arc tangent to the line. You can drag it out, enter a
chord distance that will be applied in the direction you are dragging or
enter an angle override - <90 and then type in the chord distance.
unfortunately the angle override is an absolute angle and not in relation to
the line.

To draw a line tangent to a curve reverse the process. First draw the arc.
Then start the line command. When asked to specify the first point hit
Enter. Then drag or type in a distance.

This also works when drawing 2 curves. Reverse or compound.

The above scenarios take advantage of the fact that when asked for the first
point on an entity hitting Enter will grab the endpoint of the last entity
drawn.

Allen Jessup
Rockland County Highway Dept.
New City, NY
http://www.co.rockland.ny.us/Highway/default.htm
IBM IntelliStation - 3.2 GHz. - 3GB RAM
NVidia Quardro FX 3000 w/256MB RAM
Land Desktop 2005

 

Allen,

Thank you, for awhile there I thought nobody else had any tips or tricks to
post.

 

Another option is to use a pline and switch between arcs and lines by
pressing L or A when prompted for <next point>

 

Works for going from line segment to arcs but not for going from arcs to
lines. Also you will have to explode the PLine if you need to create lines.

Allen