MASKING TRICKS

Layer Search (ON or OFF) is a great tool for weeding out the things you want to edit from those you don't, but sometimes it's just not enough. There are at least two other methods that can be used in place of or in conjunction with LyrSrch. One is "Layer Locking" and the other is "Masking".

Layer LOCK'ing

Under the Layers menu you will find a button called "Lock". If a layer is turned ON, but is LOCKED, then you can see the entities on that layer but you can not edit them. This may sound very much like LyrSrch, but with a couple of important differences:

1. With LyrSrch turned OFF, you can freely edit only the active layer.
2. With LyrSrch turned ON, you can edit all entities on any layer, individually or simultaneously. The drawback is that you often end up accidentally editing entities that you did not want to edit.
3. With layer Locking you can choose exactly which layers you want to be able to edit and which ones you don't, while still maintaining the advantage of being able to have any and all layers turned ON for viewing.
4. Turn ON all the layers you want to view and edit.
5. Click on LOCK in the layer menu and select all of the layers that you do NOT want to edit. An "X" will appear over each layers' button, signifying that it is locked.
6. Now go to your drawing and move, stretch, erase and otherwise edit the Un-Locked layers to your heart's content, with no fear of disturbing the Locked layers.

NOTE: If the ACTIVE layer is Locked you can not access the Toolbox to run macros. Either unlock the active layer, or change the active layer (with the TAB key or through the Layers On/Off menu) to one that is not locked.
 

MASK'ing

This subject is a little tougher, mainly because there are so many options, and it is not immediately obvious how to get to them or use them. If you have ever done any artwork, or even painted you home, you are already familiar with "masking". In these examples, masking is the process of selecting areas to be painted or not, simply by placing masking tape or another medium over the correct areas. In the case of DCAD, we selectively choose which entities are to be edited, no mater which layers they are on, through the use of Selection Sets and one of its features called Masking. These features will act as our masking tape.

Let's look at on option: masking by Color. We use this so often we have a keyboard macro dedicated to it (in our case it's Alt+H):

H^;^S2^F4^F8^F5^F0^F1^F8^S0^F2^F8^F3^F0^F2^S9^

Let's say you want to change all of your Red entities in a drawing to Blue, and let's then say that these entities are on different layers. You could pick Change/Color and tediously change each entity by Entity, Area, Fence, etc.

Or you could tell DataCAD to pick ("Mask") all the red entities and temporarily group them together into something called a "Selection Set". If you will be changing entities on multiple layers make sure LyrSrch is ON before making your selections. Once that is done you can pick Change/Color/Blue/SelSet and all the Red entities you "masked" will be changed to Blue. The key here was the SelSet (Selection Set) command. This told DCAD to make the changes to the currently active Selection Set.

There are 8 possible Selection Sets in DataCAD. You can have entities "remembered" in all of them at the same time, but you can have only one of them active at any one time. In the case of our keyboard macro we used the last selection set, number 8. The macro first makes sure that Selection Set 8 is empty ("cleared"), then makes SelSet 8 the active SelSet, then prompts the user to mask by color. You pick the color, then you are prompted to select entities like you usually do, by Entity, Area, Fence, etc. Only entities of the color you picked will be added to the selection set. Keep adding entities as you would like. When you are done, right click the mouse to exit the SelSet menus. All the entities you picked are now "remembered" in SelSet8, which is currently the active SelSet because of the macro.

Now any editing you want to do to the entities in the SelSet will be applied to them every time you pick an edit command and then pick SelSet from the options.

Let's see exactly what each item in the keyboard macro does:

H - Alt+H will initiate this macro
; - Edit Menu
S2 - EditSets (to edit Selection Sets)
F4 - Clear
F8 - SelSet8
F5 - Yes (to clear it of any previous entities)
F0 - SetActiv
F1 - SelSet1 (if 8 is already active, pressing it again will turn it off, so SelSet1 is picked
first, then SelSet8 is made active in the next step)
F8 - SelSet8 (to make it the active SelSet)
S0 - Exit
F2 - AddTo (to add entities to a SelSet)
F8 - SelSet8 (add the entities to SelSet8)
F3 - Area (choose by Area [ you can set this to something else if you prefer])
F0 - Mask
F2 - Color
S9 - AllOff (turn off all previous color selections in case there were any)

Whew! Now you know why it's a keyboard macro! From here you can select the color or colors (yes, you can chose more than one color at a time) that you want to "mask" by.

In step F2 - Color, you could instead choose by Entity (Line, Circle, Bezier, Arc, Point, Ellipse, Text, 3D_Line, B-Spline, AssocDim, and/or Symbol), LineType or line Weight. I could have made a keyboard macro to get me only to that step, from which I could choose one of those options, but Color is the most often used choice. If I want to choose by Entity/Text instead, then I run the macro, right click the mouse, and deselect Color. Now I can choose by something other than color. It's still faster than manually running through all those menus.

Note that you can choose multiple selections. You could choose all Text; you could choose all Text that is Red; you could choose all AssocDims, 3D_Lines and Arcs at the same time. Mix and match as you please. That's what makes it so powerful.

There are so many options that I can't possibly go through them all here, but now that you have the idea, go ahead and experiment on your own. You will probably be amazed at the new tricks you can get DataCAD to do.