Through the Interface

Jigging an AutoCAD leader with directional text using .NET

I’m sure some of you will be relieved to see I can still (more or less) manage to write code for AutoCAD… the last few days I’ve been feeling quite under-the-weather, so today’s post is a little bit of “comfort code”: sometimes while you’re brain is struggling to handle the unfamiliar, it’s very happy to tackle the familiar. At least that was the plan, and the reason I decided to tackle this recent question from Thomas Heitz: I would like to write an code to change automatically the structure label style while dragging the label. So I created two... Read more →

Jigging an AutoCAD block with attributes using .NET (redux)

Our old friend Roland Feletic emailed me last week. He’d been having some trouble with this previous post when jigging blocks with multiline attributes. Roland had also identified some code in this post on another blog which worked properly for him. I spent some time looking into what was wrong with the original post. It certainly didn’t deal with the appropriate placement of multiline text, and didn’t take proper care of annotation scaling and UCS. Time for a do-over. :-) The following C# code is a combination of the code from the previous post and the approach spiderinnet1 took... Read more →

Jigging an AutoCAD hatch using .NET (redux)

Many thanks to Holger Rasch who worked out how to fix the code in this previous post. It really doesn’t matter that 3 years have passed, Holger – I have no doubt people will greatly appreciate the fact the code can now run without causing the annoying display issues it produced previously. Holger made a few adjustments to the implementation to make sure the persistent hatch loop gets added and removed in the right places. Here’s the updated C# code: using Autodesk.AutoCAD.ApplicationServices; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.DatabaseServices; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.EditorInput; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.Geometry; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.Runtime; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.Colors; using System; namespace HatchJig { class JigUtils... Read more →

Moving text in an AutoCAD block using .NET – Part 3

I wasn’t expecting to write a third part in this series of posts, but then Samir Bittar went and asked a follow-up question that I felt obliged to look into. Thanks for the suggestion, Samir! :-) Samir basically wanted to provide the user with more feedback as they’re selecting the nested entity – so that the sub-entity gets highlighted, rather than the full block reference. This turned out to be quite a tricky scenario to address. The overall approach I used was to use a PointMonitor to perform a non-interactive, nested selection of the geometry beneath the cursor and... Read more →

Moving text in an AutoCAD block using .NET – Part 2

I was planning to post about Autodesk University 2013 today, but things have just been too hectic. I have a 3-hour layover in Heathrow on the journey home – which starts this evening – so I’ll try to use that to post a summary of this year’s AU as experienced by yours truly. In the last post we saw some code to move an entity – any entity, with text as the primary requirement – in a block. Here’s a version of the C# code that shows the entity as it’s being jigged across the screen to its new... Read more →

Selecting an area of a perspective image to de-skew inside AutoCAD using HTML5 and JavaScript

So after several posts leading up to the big reveal, as it were, in today’s post we’re going to see the full “De-skew Raster” application in action – and give you the complete source to fool around with. The main addition over where we were in the last post is the HTML5 and JavaScript UI implementation, as well as the new C# command – called DESKEW – that loads and displays it: Our JavaScript code uses the new JavaScript API in AutoCAD 2014 to execute the other command (DESKEW_IMAGE, which we saw implemented last time) that drives the core... Read more →

Jigging AutoCAD geometry in an arbitrary UCS using JavaScript

I’ve learned a few things since the last post, where we complemented AutoCAD’s new JavaScript API with some additional .NET functionality to work around an issue that existed in the code we’d developed in the previous two posts. Firstly, I found out there’s a better way for your jig to display transient graphics than via “manual” calls to addTransient(), updateTransient() and eraseTransient(). Acad.Jig exposes an update() function you can call, passing in the xml fragment representing your geometry. The jig will manage the display of the transient and clear it at the end. (Thanks to Sherry Tan for pointing... Read more →

Complementing AutoCAD’s JavaScript API using .NET

After having some fun writing our first jig inside AutoCAD, last week, and calling it either from an HTML page or an AutoCAD command defined in a .js file, in today’s post we’re going to see how we can use AutoCAD’s .NET API to extend its new JavaScript layer. We’re going to take a concrete problem we had in last week’s implementation: it turns out that when you draw a transient circle beneath the cursor using JavaScript – as we do during our jig – it absorbs mouse clicks. This is something we’ve logged as an issue, but it... Read more →

Jigging an AutoCAD circle from a JavaScript-defined command

Just to complement yesterday’s post showing how to define a simple jig using JavaScript, here’s the same code from a separate .js file: var doc = Acad.Application.activedocument; var center = new Acad.Point3d(0, 0, 0); var radius = 0; var trId; function pointToString(pt) { var ret = pt.x.toString() + "," + pt.y.toString() + "," + pt.z.toString(); return ret; } function createCircle(cen, rad, first) { // Build an XML string containing data to create // an AcGiTransient that represents the circle var cursor = ''; var drawable = '' + 'Read more →

Jigging an AutoCAD circle using JavaScript

After talking about the architecture of our JavaScript API in this recent post – and mentioning the approach we expect developers to take when creating geometry in one of the comments – I thought it would be worth spending the time to write my first JavaScript jig in AutoCAD. For those of you who haven’t come across jigs in either ObjectARX or AutoCAD .NET, jigs are the primary way applications request users to dynamically specify geometric parameters while providing them with graphical feedback. As users select points or specify distances, the object or objects they’re creating are updated in... Read more →

Show me the money!

Or otherwise named “Creating an AutoCAD jig to dynamically display a guilloché pattern using F#”. But then why pass up the chance for a Jerry Maguire reference? :-) Anyway, to continue on from last week’s post, Doug – who had presented the original challenge – went on to suggest that I give it the same treatment as Spiro. Basically to implement a jig to display the guilloche pattern dynamically as you input the various options. I understand the difficulty in understanding the nature of the geometry being created in the previous version… the fact that I’d named the original... Read more →

Kinect Fusion inside AutoCAD

OK, here goes: my first (public) attempt at integrating the brand new Kinect Fusion functionality – made available this week in v1.7 of Microsoft’s Kinect for Windows SDK – into AutoCAD. There are still a few quirks, so I dare say I’ll be posting an update in due course. As mentioned in the last post, I’ve been working on this for some time but can now show it publicly, as the required SDK capabilities have now been published. As part of this effort, I’ve gone ahead and made sure the other Kinect samples I’ve written for AutoCAD work with... Read more →

Creating a square AutoCAD box via the jig entity framework and .NET

After creating a frustum-shaped jig “manually”, refactoring the code while introducing the idea of an “Entity Jig Framework and then updating the framework and providing a number of usage examples, today’s post looks at a slightly more complex use-case: defining a jig to create a square (in X & Y) box by selecting opposing corners. It may sound simple, but it was actually harder that it sounds – especially when supporting the use of an arbitrary User Coordinate System. It also makes use of a “phase” type that we previously hadn’t needed, as we require point input for our... Read more →

Update to the AutoCAD .NET entity jig framework

In the last post I introduced a simple framework to make the definition of multi-input entity jigs more straightforward. A big thanks to Chuck Wilbur, who provided some feedback that has resulted in a nicer base implementation, which we’ll take for a spin in today’s post. Here’s the updated C# framework code that makes use of a simple class hierarchy for our phase definitions: using Autodesk.AutoCAD.DatabaseServices; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.EditorInput; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.Geometry; using System.Collections.Generic; using System; namespace JigFrameworks { // Two abstract base classes: one for all phases... public abstract class Phase { // Our member data (could add real properties,... Read more →

A framework for defining AutoCAD entity jigs using .NET

In the last post we saw some code to create a frustum-shaped Solid3d object inside AutoCAD. I mentioned at the bottom of that post that there seemed to be an opportunity to write a framework of some kind to abstract away some of the repetitive code needed to create a multi-input jig. I probably didn’t say it in quite that way, but that was what I was getting at. :-) Anyway, after having looked at it some more, here’s what I came up with: the EntityJigFramework. It’s a class derived from EntityJig that encapsulates some of the common code... Read more →

A handy jig for creating AutoCAD text using .NET – Part 4

After the first three parts of this series covered the basic jig that makes use of the standard keywords mechanism to adjust text’s style and rotation as it’s being placed, it eventually made sense to implement the remaining requirement initially provided for the jig: this post looks at different approaches for having the jig respond to single keystrokes rather than full keyword inputs. Dave Osborne very helpfully got me started on this by providing an initial implementation that makes use of an IMessageFilter – something he’d apparently gleaned from this previous post. Thanks, Dave! :-) All the approaches I’ll... Read more →

A handy jig for creating AutoCAD text using .NET – Part 3

Earlier in this series, we implemented a jig to rotate, size and place text more easily in an AutoCAD drawing, which we then extended to allow adjustment of font-level properties. In this post, we’re going to add some additional functionality to allow the text to be justified differently around the cursor location. It has to be said that the code introduced in this post isn’t very extensive, but nonetheless tricky to get right (and therefore deserving of its own post). It’s also worth noting that the changes would be much more complicated if we hadn’t designed the code to... Read more →

A handy jig for creating AutoCAD text using .NET – Part 2

In the last post, we saw a simple jig implementation to position, size and rotate standard AutoCAD text. In this post, we’re extending that implementation to handle font properties such as bold and italic text. At first blush, this sounds pretty straightforward – how hard can it be, right? The complexity gets introduced when we consider that these are not properties that are exposed directly from the text itself, but from the associated text style (or – to be more accurate – from the font descriptor object associated with the text style). Which begs the question: when the user... Read more →

A handy jig for creating AutoCAD text using .NET – Part 1

Back in March, I received an email from Thomas Fitou suggesting an interesting blog topic: I was thinking about a cool feature in jigs: You invoke a command to enter an Mtext or text The editor is asking for some text You enter the text Then a jig is dragged asking for position But in the editor appear some options:[R]egular [B]old [I]talic [R]otate 90 If the user hits "B" the text becomes bold If the user hits "R" the text is rotated 90 degrees If the user hits "R" again, another 90 degrees and so on... It struck me... Read more →

Face tracking inside AutoCAD using Kinect

After discovering, earlier in the week, that version 1.5 of the Kinect SDK provides the capability to get a 3D mesh of a tracked face, I couldn’t resist seeing how to bring that into AutoCAD (both inside a jig and as database-resident geometry). I started by checking out the pretty-cool FaceTracking3D sample, which gives you a feel for how Kinect tracks faces, super-imposing an exaggerated, textured mesh on top of your usual face in a WPF dialog: I decided to go for a more minimalist (which also happens to mean it’s simpler and with less scary results :-) approach... Read more →