F8 Autocad Not Working

[Oliver Parkes]

My grips stopped working. I first noticed it as I was trying to resize a viewport. Now in paperspace even drawing a polyline I can't manipulate it using the grips. Picking a blue corner it just turns red. I've tried putting things on different layers and made sure everything is turned on. I've had this problem before and can't figure it out.

Thanks. I ended up re-booting and when I re-opened the drawing things were back to normal. I've had this problem before though and I suspect it will happen again, so I'll keep your suggestions close at hand. Yes I'm using Civil 3D 2014. I can't be sure but it seems this issue may be related to making changes to the scale while using annotative text and/or making changes to the scale while using dynamic arrows/scale bars.

Here we go again with the same problem! I knew it was only a matter of time. I don't know if it is something I'm doing or what. I tried all your suggestions and nothing worked. The settings are already set as you suggest. Any other ideas are appreciated.

No I've never re-installed. This problem occurs fairly rarely... maybe once a week. Usually I can save, close, then re-open the drawing and it will work fine, but the problem will occur again later in that same drawing. Seems like it happens recurringly only in certain drawings, though I don't know what would distinguish those drawings from all my others.

If you are using Civil 3D, this can be cause by using the North Arrow Layout Element, and a clipped viewport. AutoCAD will just stop responding, you won't be able to move grips, etc. You will have to restart AutoCAD, make your layout, and then explode the North Arrow.

Becoming familiar with the AutoCAD user interface is your first step in getting to know the software. Tour the ribbon and try out the Command line. Learn how to open a drawing or create a new one, and then you can access them remotely. Create simple geometry using construction lines, grids, and the UCS as guides.

AutoCAD includes a standard tabbed ribbon across the top of the application. You can access nearly all the commands presented in this guide from the Home tab. In addition, the Quick Access toolbar shown below includes familiar commands such as New, Open, Save, Print, and Undo.

Notice that as you start to type a command, it completes automatically. When several possibilities are available such as in the example below, you can make your choice by clicking it or using the arrow keys and then pressing Enter or the Spacebar.

Tip: When you look for an option, try right-clicking. Depending on where you locate your cursor and whether you're in a command, the shortcut menu that displays provides relevant commands and options.

You can easily conform to industry or company standards by specifying settings for text, dimensions, linetypes, and several other features. For example, this backyard deck design displays two different dimension styles.

The "Tutorial" template files in the list are simple examples for the architectural or mechanical design disciplines with both imperial (i) and metric (m) versions. You might want to experiment with them when you start creating dimensions.

You can save any drawing (.dwg) file as a drawing template (.dwt) file. To create a new drawing template file based on an existing one, open the existing drawing template file, modify it, and then save it again with a different filename.

If you work independently, you can develop your drawing template files to suit your working preferences, adding settings for additional features as you become familiar with them. To modify an existing drawing template file, click Open, specify Drawing Template (*.dwt) in the Select File dialog box, and choose the drawing template file.

If you plan to work in feet and inches, use the UNITS command to set the unit type to Architectural, and then when you create objects, specify their lengths in inches. If you plan to use metric units, leave the unit type set to Decimal. Changing the unit format and precision does not affect the internal precision of your drawing. It affects only how lengths, angles, and coordinates are displayed in the user interface.

Tip: If you change a setting for the unit display or any other setting, you can save the settings in a drawing template file. Otherwise, you'll need to change the settings for each new drawing.

Always create your models at full size (1:1 scale). The term model refers to the geometry of your design. A drawing includes the model geometry along with the views, notes, dimensions, callouts, tables, and the title block displayed in the layout.

Tip: When you zoom in or out, the location of the cursor is important. Think of your cursor as a magnifying glass. For example, if you position the cursor in the upper-right area of the floor plan as shown below, rolling the mouse wheel magnifies that area without shifting it.

The previous view displays. Also note that typing a command or a command alias followed by pressing the Spacebar or Enter key is often abbreviated with a description like this: "Enter the ZOOM command."

The other commonly used options in the ZOOM command are Window and Extents. The Window option enables you to specify a rectangular window of the area that you want to display. The Extents option displays all of the objects in the drawing area.

It can be helpful to be able to access your drawing files while on a job site, the shop floor, at a meeting, or when travelling. With your AutoCAD or AutoCAD LT subscription, you can view, create, and modify drawings on any of these devices:

If you have an account with a cloud storage provider, you can add it to your Places bar in AutoCAD file selection dialog boxes for direct navigation to the drawings in your cloud storage account. Simply right-click within the Places bar and enter a name and path for the navigation shortcut.

To specify the starting point for this line, you would type in the Cartesian coordinates 0,0. It's generally a good idea to locate one corner of your model at 0,0, which is called the origin point. To locate additional points, you could specify additional X,Y coordinate locations in the drawing area, however more efficient methods for specifying points are available, and will be presented in the Precision topic.

Some people like working with grid lines as a reference, while others prefer working in a blank area. To turn off the grid display, press F7. Even with the grid turned off, you can force your cursor to snap to grid increments by pressing F9.

Alternatively, you can enter CIRCLE or just C in the Command window and click to choose an option. If you do, you can specify a center point, or you can click one of the highlighted command options as shown below.

Polylines can have a constant width or they can have different starting and ending widths. After you specify the first point of the polyline, you can use the Width option to specify the width of all subsequently created segments. You can change the width value at any time, even as you create new segments.

The user coordinate system (UCS) icon indicates the direction of the positive X and Y axis for any coordinates that you enter, and it also defines the horizontal and vertical directions in a drawing. In some 2D drawings, it can be convenient to click and place the UCS to change the origin point and the X or Y axis.

When you start the HATCH command, the ribbon temporarily displays the Hatch Creation tab. On this tab, you can choose from more than 70 industry-standard imperial and ISO hatch patterns, along with many specialized options.

The simplest procedure is to choose a hatch pattern and scale from the ribbon, and click within any area that is completely enclosed by objects. You need to specify the scale factor for the hatch to control its size and spacing.

For overlapping hatches, fills, wide polylines, and text objects, use the DRAWORDER command to determine which objects are on top or below the others. For example, you probably want the yellow highway to cross the blue river rather than the other way around.

Any chance someone has figured out how to get back publish in the backgroud? Funny sidenote; I had to use the "Reset Settings to Default" program to reset my profile (for a different reason) and the publish in the background worked, until that is I reapplied my previous saved profile. I check all of my paths in my profile and it seemed like everything is pointing to the right folder (unless it's a setting I have checked deep in my profile that i can't figure out)?

If you want to (possibly) get to the cause of the issue, the thing to do, then, is to gradually recreate your custom profile by starting with the profile wherein background publishing works and incrementally change settings, testing after each change you make. As you note, a profile is more than just path settings, so you would have to go through (at least) each tab of the Options command, and then proceed to work your way through a bunch of other settings that are not included there.

An alternative that might also reveal something is to use SYSVDLG (Express Tools, System Variable Editor), which has a "Save all" button to export all the current settings to a file. Export from each profile and compare the settings.

I am sorry for digging up an old post. I am experiencing the same problem in AutoCAD Mechanical 2013. I have run it with my custom profile for years on an older computer with no issues at all. I bought a new computer (same OS) and loaded my profile and batch plotting didn't work. It froze just like described above. Unfortunately, the background trick didn't work for me. It actually made it worse because now it doesn't ask where to save the file. I found a help article that recommended deleting a directory in the registry, which I did. It didn't help, so I restored it. Any other ideas?

The new computer has 2 hard drives, one for the OS and one for the documents. The old one had one HD for everything. In the batch plot publish options, the location was set to my OS hard drive. I changed it to my documents hard drive and changed the "publish to" to "PDF" instead of "plotter named in page setup." It is now working. I can see where this may be an issue if you are printing to a printer and not a PDF file, and if you are saving to a network drive that may change (you would have to change the publish options each time.

c80f0f1006