By John Flanagan
AutoCAD – From Snap Function
Using the Shift key in conjunction with the mouse and right click menus will greatly improve your efficiency and productivity in AutoCAD. Shift + Right mouse button will bring up your OSNAPs during editing commands providing your Right Click options are set accordingly in Options > User Preferences.
In this blog we will look at the From tool listed above the OSNAP options.
Look at the next illustration. Let’s assume that we want to draw a circle and the centre of the circle needs to be exactly at 10 units from the midpoint of the angled line and the 10-unit line should be inclined to an angle of 30 degrees.
Method 1
To achieve this, we could draw a 10 mm line from the midpoint of the angled line in the diagram at an angle of 30 degrees and draw the circle at its endpoint. We would then delete the guideline.
Method 2
Using the From snap option does not require any helping guideline. Select the circle tool directly from the draw panel, press and hold the shift key, right click, and select the From option. Following the prompt to specify the base point, click the mid-point of the angled line in the diagram. Now we need to specify the exact location of the centre of the circle relative to the base point. The point is located at 10 units and it is inclined to an angle of 30 degrees. On your keyboard type @10<30 and press enter. Type 5mm for the radius of the circle and again press enter.
Using the relative co-ordinate is more efficient than drawing and erasing guidelines.