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Al Whitley/5 min read

Configuring AutoCAD for VDCI Template: Command Options and System Variables

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This AutoCAD tutorial walks through configuring autocad for vdci template: command options and system variables, covering essential tools and techniques for your projects.

We are in our template file, so I can confirm that by going File, Save As. You can see it's saving it as the VDCI template file as a DWT. I'm going to overwrite the file, and it is VDCI template 01.

There are some more things I need to do to configure the software. One deals with system options or system variables. Another one deals with commands themselves.

So I, for example, am going to go to the Home tab, and I'm going to draw a line from here to here, and a line from here to here. If I go up to Fillet, and if I do a right-click Radius, you can see that I have a Fillet Radius variable set as 0. AutoCAD does not always have the Fillet Radius variable set as 0. With the 2014 products and earlier, the default value has a Fillet Radius of 0.5. So what I'm going to do is just confirm I have a Fillet Radius of 0, and I'm going to pick these two lines. And I can now delete them.

So what I've done is I've now set the Fillet Radius variable as 0, and that variable is being saved within the drawing template file itself. So what I'm working on right now are setting the command defaults within the system file. Something else I'd like to do is the text.

I'm just going to go to Single Line Text. I will give it a base point. You can see it has a variable height of 6.

Sometimes AutoCAD ships with a variable height of 1⁄8, so I want to make sure that it's 6. Press ENTER twice. I'm just going to type something in, press ENTER twice, and then delete it.

So again, what I'm trying to do is to set certain options that are within the program itself. These options are being saved to the template file. So I'm going to go up and say File, Save As, and I'm going to save it once again as my template file.

I have provided you a document that is called Command Options, and so there is a list of all of these command options that you need to set for your template file to follow the parameters that we're using here at VDCI. So again, that's a file that's called Command Options. I am not going to go through all of those variables right now, but I wanted to let you know that that dataset is there for you to configure your file.

We've set some command options. There are some other functions we'd like to do which are linked up with the CUIX file or the User Interface file. Again, I have a file for you called User Interface, and in that User Interface file, it's a PDF, are all of the options for you to use to set some system variables.

So one of these I'm going to type in is VT Options. VT Options is a function of how the computer is showing zooms. And so I'm going to disable the animations for pan and zooms because it's just going to slow down your machine.

So what I'm doing is I'm changing the VT Options variable, turning off animations for pan and zoom. I have another variable called Image Frame. What Image Frame does is when

You end up putting in a JPEG image or a PDF, Image Frame options controls whether or not there is a border around the image frame itself.

Now you can see that by default, it's saying the image frame value is 1. What that means is there's going to be a border drawn around the image. You can pick on that border to resize it, but that border will print. If I set the variable at 0, what it's going to do is it's going to print the JPEG or PDF image without a border, but because there's not a border on it, I cannot pick on the border and resize it.

So the variable that I want to use is Image Frame with a variable setting of 2. What that does is it puts a border around the image so I can grab the border to resize the image, but it will not print that border. So I've just changed my Image Frame system variable. Another one I can change is my PD mode, which is my point style.

The PD mode value of 0 means it displays only a small dot, which can be really hard to see. So I'm going to set my PD mode to 3 and hit ENTER. Now, again, in the document that I provided for you, which is the PDF called User Interface, I list many system variables to change.

Another I'd like to put in is WIPARC, W-H-I-P-A-R-C. Turning on WIPARC means setting its value to 1. What WIPARC does is WIPARC controls how arcs display when zooming in non-regenerative zoom mode.

So I'm putting in a WIPARC value of 1. So, again, there are two documents I've created for you, the User Interface PDF and the Command Option PDF. That lists all of these options that I feel are important for appropriately configuring our system. I'm not going to go through them all because I'm going to let you go through those documents and modify them yourselves.

So have fun.