AutoCAD 2006 Wishlist

AutoCAD 2005 is barely out the door, and now I'm wanting more? There are things in AutoCAD that bug me, some that I've asked Autodesk to fix for years now. Other bug-things are new in AutoCAD 2005. Here's what I'd like to see fixed; feel free to contribute ideas.

The ImageAttach command is limited to opening raster data from files. It should access the TWAIN driver, so that images can be imported from devices, such as scanners and digital cameras, directly into the drawing.

The TaskBar system variable is a weak substitute for true MDI tabs. (Each additional drawing in AutoCAD displays a button on the taskbar.) I find lots of buttons on the taskbar annoying. To switch quickly betwen drawings, I'd prefer to see tabs inside AutoCAD, similar to the existing tabs for switching between layouts.

WMF, a relic from Windows v3.1, needs to be updated to EMF.And better contols over the quality of the enhanced metafile when pasting in other applications. How hard can it be to crop the image to its extents?

The Rectang command doesn't draw rectangles at an angle -- not even when Snap Rotate is turned on.

Anyone notice how slowly the Layer dialog box loads? Autodesk rewrote it using the .Net programming interface. Microsoft "Innovation": how we must we continue to suffer under it.

I dislike icons. Intensely. Most of them make no sense to me. I recognize icons only by color and outline shape; all the muddled pixels inside the outline are meaningless mush to me. I was thus unimpressed with Autodesk changing clearly-labled text buttons to cryptic icon buttons scrunched together in a tight row in the redesigned Publish command. My time is too valuable to have to pause the cursor over a button, and then wait for the tooltip to slowly appear.

A disturbing trend in AutoCAD 2005 is shoving many commands and options onto shortcut menus. Tthe idea is, I suppose, to clean up the interface by "hidding" less-used commands. Not a good idea. I've found four problems with this approach:

1. Shortcut menus tend to be context-sensitive. This means I see a different set of commands -- or none at all -- depending on where I right-click. It is very confusing to know where to click in order to get the command I need.

2. Shortcut menus take an extra step: (1) Right-click, and then (2) select the command. I don't like layers of interface. On my desk, papers are spread out and not in folders; when papers are in folders, I don't know they exist.

3. I cannot create custom toolbars and menus with commands found only on shortcut menus. There goes AutoCAD's much-vaunted customization ability :<

4. Online help is unavailable. I can't press F1 to find out the purpose of commands on shortcut menus. For example, what is the By Row option of the Merge Cells command? Even supposed-to-be-realtime Active Assistance (aka Info Palette) is of no help.

Speaking of help, the online help provided with AutoCAD2004 and 2005 have significant numbers of errors and ommisions. The two biggest problems are incorrect cross-references, and overly general cross-references. But there are also many minor yet irritating errors. I've written software documentation in the past, and so I can understand the frustation of tech writers forced to work with incomplete software, but Autodesk needs to now ship cleaned-up, post-shipping-AutoCAD help files.

Comments

[Al Worker]

can you show me how to change a title block sheet that was drawn in a UCS and covert to WCS.

[Joseph]

I need your help to develop a lisp routine to distribute the text to the length of polyline curve made up of lines and arcs. Each letter of text should be aligned to the curve and whole text should be one string.

[VICTOR LAXAMANA]

Purge to include all layer filters and deleted in one go!!!!

Posted by: VICTOR LAXAMANA 03APR2005SUNDAY

[Rod]

I would like to have blocks that can be inserted into model space and then when I add a viewport that block is displayed at the scale of the viewport. A good example of this would be room number tags. If I had a 1/8" viewport the block would be displayed at a 96 scale factor, then if I had a blown up viewport of the same area at 3/4" scale the block would display at a 16 scale factor.

[Scour]

Fix the plot view. When you create view where you want to plot and delete the plot view, AutoCAD 2005 doesn't recognize the plot view if you create new view. It used to work for 2004.

Also Autodesk should keep their program less bloated. When I install Arch. Desktop with AutoCAD shortcut option avaiable, I am expecting ADT to run differently from AutoCAD. Instead ADT load their AEC definition within AutoCAD. I find this unnecessary because it makes the drawing slower to load than conventional AutoCAD.

Give me a break! I think before you post a comment you should at least read the users guide to see if what you are whining about is in there! So many of these things are already possible.

[Jim Dee]

I think hatch patterns with permanent boundaries that can be edited would be a huge benefit. Also a setting to turn boundaries on/off would be great.

[Jamie Richardson]

How about remembering what I copy/pasted three copy/paste ago. I would like to be able to pick from a list or images from say.. my last eight entity groups I copy/pasted in autocad.

[Paul the Piper]

Sorry, some other stuff that I just remembered which are annoying (now that I'm thinking about it):

AutoCAD should be able to remember and open all the previous session's open drawings upon startup, similar to Firefox's ability to set multiple homepages.

Has any consideration ever been given to colour-blind users?

[Paul the Piper]

Switching between drawings in a single instance of AutoCAD is a pain; I always end up picking the wrong minimized file (I think someone mentioned tabs already).

Why can't AutoCAD recognize that a broken line (I.E., center, phantom, etc.) is actually a continuous line? It drives me nuts when I try to snap to perpendicular when zoomed-in, but ACAD balks because "perpendicular" happens to be on one of the spaces.

One other thing: why can't preferred osnaps be saved? A third-party 2D piping program I often use disables osnap because a right-click is offerred. This causes me to re-select my preferred osnap settings.

On the other hand, I'm learning DesignReview for PDS (MicroStation) piping models and finding it to be quite a chore - no zoom window, confusing pan function, no undo...

On the third hand, I've never been an AutoCAD (or any kind of CAD) expert so maybe I'm doing something wrong with both programs.

[John Burrill]

I've seen some good ideas in this thread. I especially like the idea of slow-double-click to rename a layout instead of using the right-click menu. As a matter of fact, I like using slow double-click to edit a lot of labels such as dtext, attribute values and maybe some intrinsic measurements like circle radius.
That aside, I think some of the posters need to make platform decisions.
I'm glad there's solid modelling in AutoCAD. It's how I got started in 3D. But the fact remains, if you're doing mech-cad you should be looking at a parametric modeller. If you're outputting renderings or animations, you should be using Max or VIZ and if you're doing home design, you should be using Revit.
Yes, it takes a lot of time and money to become proficient with these programs, but every cardinal improvement in visual communication from charcoal to fresco to oilpaint to Photoshop has required artisans to make learning an integral part of their career plans.
AutoCAD is a highly generalized toolset with very broad applications, like a box of lego's. It's used in companies that are highly specialized in their products, not their design discipline. It's flexibility is it's key attribute. I've seen AutoCAD used for desktop publishing, retail mapping, and datalinking and as a nuetral format for programs that want nothing to do with eachother like Solidworks and Microsoft Word.
So, in that vain, I have a few suggestions for expanding AutoCAD's domain.
1) Bring back designXML so that we can format and run drawing schedules from SQL Server
2) expose the acis modeller code so that 3d solids can be edited using lisp and other API's
3) Link display order to the layer index
4) programming hooks for photoshop and illustrator fills, brush formats and filters
5) attach dWF's as External references. You're 90% of the way there with markup set manager.
6) bundle DWF Composer with the software.
7) Multi-stroke linetypes (double-lines)
8) .Net api support for Visual Studio 2003.
9) An ADO connection underlying the contents of a table
10) fields that support mathematical calculations (so you can format parcel labels in Square yeards or Hectares)
11) associativity between the layer states in the base drawing's saved views and the viewport layer settings in Sheet Set Manager.
12) Driving dimensions.
13) modeless plot, drawing properties and style dialogs
14) ixnae on the the irtualvae oomzae indowae. There's no reason regenerating the drawing should interupt a command in progress
15) snap to object centroid
16) midway between 2points should accept nested input (midway between the midway between two points for example) JEEZ, you can do this with lisp
17)keyframe animation: nothing as robust as Max, but simple path interpolation could go a long way towards turning 2D files into live presentations. Along with that there should be basic AVI creation materials
18) extrude along a 3d spline: good god we're sick of faking screw threads.
19) License configuration switcher: they have this in Max and Inventor for redirecting an installation to draw a stand-alone license or one hosted on a server.
20) a free DWG viewer. Solidworks has one, so does Bentley. There's no point in sending people across the street who just want to look at drawings and no one's going to pay a hundred bucks for the privelege.
21) Scale improvements to the platform into the verticals. Map, Architectural Desktop, AutoCAD Mechanical and Civil 3d should all implement tables, sheet set manager and use a common database connectivity mechanism.
22) Transparant and screened fills.
23) Transparant UCS command: this one's a long time coming because the UCS does nothing more than transform coordinates and vectors and entities store information in the WCS.
24) perpendicular and tangent snaps to a 3dsolid face
25) run-time code editing ability in Visual Lisp
26) function parameters tooltips in visual lisp
27)copy block definition to a new name
28) dimesion line and arrow halo masking
There's a lot of places for this software to go and it's not tired as a solution by a long shot.
My two cents.
John

[Rico]

I would like more space for my custum dictionary, it can't contain enough words. There is no dutch dictionary.

[Brian Stewart]

I agree the layer command dialogue is slow to open, it's taking several seconds to open even on a 2.8GHz. Mtext should have the equivalent or better features than wordpad, which it still doesn't come close to. Tables could do with a pop up toolbar which displays all editing commands etc. Proper easy to use batch plot program for multiple drawings/copies. Autolisp program with two clicks replaces one block with another. PDF creation is to slow why can't it be as quick as PDFFactory which only take's seconds. Images should be able to be bound like xref's. Some built-in lite raster image editing/touch up features. File open dialogue should include thumbnails facility plus left pane with favourites/short cuts to project folders etc. An easy to use AutoCAD automation program could be useful to speed up repatative tasks i.e. file management etc. Facility to select a series of drawings and email them immediately. Thanks! Autodesk please speed up development of the long over due Mac OS X DWF viewer.

[Brian]

A proper import routine for eTransmit (or Pack'n'Go, or whatever it's called now) is long overdue. It's all very well being able to package xrefs, fonts, shape files, plot style tables etc into a single package for export; but a waste of time if the recipient doesn't actually install and use all the fonts, shape files etc. AutoCAD should have an "import eTransmit package" option which will suck in all the various files, put them in the correct places and guarantee that they are actually used when the drawing itself is opened.

[RoSiNiNo]

1. It would be good if a field could have a format.
2. When you want to plot a layout with two different renderd mviews, it would be nice to save a scene with the mview.

[Cadmaster]

What AutoCAD 2006 need is to update their rendering file. You can render as 8-bit BMP and not 24-bit BMP. Also there is no option to render as PNG or JPG. It would be nice to render as those format.

[Robert Scott]

Hi,
Happeeeee New Year.
Cannot get my AutoCad Lt 2000i to run after my I.T.techo serviced my PC. A 6 hour marathon removing one Trojan Horse and 78 Spycatchers. Was using AVG and it let this junk through.
Now back to Anti Norton which has given me much trouble previouisly and that is why we ditched it.
So, Anti-Norton back on and AutoCad wont run.
Tried turning Anti-Norton off ans still wont run.
Do you know of anything to stop my old 2000i to re-start in ht enew year?
Any patches to download to run Anti-Norton and AutoCAdlt 2000i symultaniously?
Cheers Robert

[Laurie Comerford]

The AutoCAD linetype process is very primitive and it's time is was updated to both make the definition of a linetype easier, and to make the display independent of the direction from which it is viewed.
In addition, linetypes which include text display should allow the text to be dragged along the line as with a Land Desktop Contour label.

The definition process should allow the ends of the line to be modified separately from the middle sections.
eg it should be possible to define a line with circles at each end, with the line ending at the centre of the cirle.

[sujan]

AutoCAD will remain 2D popular program even though now it is age of 3D MCAD programs. So they should provide:

1. Constraints and power sketcher like inventor/solidworks/pro/e
2. Automatic balloon text and BOM
3. somehelp with linetype scales...
4. Dimensioning
5. Get rid of Solidmodeling which is of no use once you save the file ...autocad will die like Mech. Desktop if they enhance solidmodeling in autocad
6. command to draw centerline i.e. click circle and it will draw center lines
7. Text justification in Mtext i.e. if you type multiple line text start point is same but end it not same for the lines
8. Command to draw only arrowhead . How many people have to draw separate arrowhead for cuttling plane lines.
9. Machine marks
10. Symbols list in MTEXT editor

many many still to come....

[JG]

How about more 3D commands, I would like to be able to use a loft tool in autocad and a better way to do surfacing. I know there is inventor, solidworks, solidedge but I don't like the constrains, where I work I have to move around every part I draw a lot. And right now I don't have the training to do that in Inventor or other package. Also a BOM option would be nice.

[Le Mule]

THE NEW ICONS ARE WASTING MY TIME and STRAINING MY EYES!
All in all 2005 is doing what it should, I dont expect or want radical changes that take time (money) to learn all over.

THE NEW ICONS were a waste of Autodesk's money and now they are costing me. Give us an option to easily use the icons that have been FINE for years.

[Ulrich Scheidweiler]

Eine sinnvolle Verbesserung waere wenn man die Layer stufenlos transparent schalten koennte ( aehnlich wie bei Photoshop)

[incognito]

we wish that the programm calculate the scansion of different objects

[nt]

maybe an object lock comand or any other object specific commands. (doesn't effect all objects on matching layer)

[Jan]

A few comments to previous posts.

It would be a good idea to cut the price of AutoCAD somewhat if you compare it to compatible/compatitive programs.

I read a lot of complaints which can easily be overcome by a little customisation. Right click menus can be adapted/modified in the custom menu and replace the original pop50* with the menucmd in the mnl that loads with the custom mnu. You can migrate your custom menu without a problem.

Cannot import Excel sheets? Come on! Select the part of the table you wish to incorporate in your drawing. Copy it to the clipboard and paste it as an AutoCAD object. True there is no bidirectional sync but how about OLE?

Export to PDF? I would prefer to use DWF as it is more compact and better suited to support additional data. Don't see PDF do that anytime soon now. And what about the speed of Reader 6? Before that one is up and running my working day is over. How about the filesize of a PDF compared to that of the same drawing published as DWF?

Circular selection? I think there are enough ways to select objects in AutoCAD and reading the other comments makes me wonder if there are a lot of users looking for more.

So to wrap it up: Everybody has just reasons to complain if they miss features in AutoCAD that other software (Excel??) has. But what might be usefull for one can be a hinder for another. AutoCAD wasn't built just for you but to assist millions of users in there day-to-day engineering. I am glad Autodesk has come up with Sheet Sets, for example, to help me organise and control my projects and has given me tools to easily distribute and publish (parts) of those Sheet Sets.

And John John, if you really hate the software that much, go use another program and come back in a year or so to tell us your experiences.