By Dennis Collin
I had a recent query where a customer had an Xref drawing attached to his main drawing which was rotated at an angle. The customer had realigned the UCS in the view in his main drawing with the geometry in the Xref, yet the crosshairs were not aligned with the UCS grid.
AutoCAD has a system variable called SNAPANG which is used to set the snap and grid rotation angle for the current viewport relative to the current UCS. This variable is saved in the drawing. It is worth noting that when SNAPANG is set to a value other than 0, the lined grid (if enabled) does not display, as shown in the image above.
It transpired that the value of SNAPANG in my client’s drawing had been set to the same angle as the rotated Xref. So, the crosshairs were always aligned with the geometry in the Xef but not with the UCS in the main drawing. Resetting the value of SNAPANG back to 0 realigned the crosshairs with the UCS solving the problem.