Leveraging Linetypes in AutoCAD

SAM LUCIDO: I'm just going to talk while we're getting going here. And then we'll get started at 3:00-- well, I have 45. What is it, 3:45? 2:45. This whole-- if you guys know me, I'm big fan of the sheet sets. So I put everything in sheet sets.

So what I'm going to do at the end of this, I'm going to go through-- hang on. This is how I usually-- typically, sometimes separate drawings when I do training sessions. So what I'm going to do after today is archive it, zip it and put it up on the data set. So everything you see me do, it's going to be there for you when you get back.

That way it's-- and some of them aren't-- they won't be complete, but they'll be-- all the code and everything will be in there. It just helps me stay organized. The PowerPoint-- and you'll notice if any of you downloaded the PowerPoint, the PowerPoint's there for me to keep time. It's really not there for me to teach you anything. I mean, I'd rather do a live demo.

Now, there is a video at the end. I can explain why, but we'll get to that at the end. So if anybody's too upset about the video, just come and see me after, and I'll tell you why. It's only five minutes long. So linetypes-- Autodesk didn't think anybody wanted to hear about this.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

SAM LUCIDO: There we go. That's why you got the prize. I am giving away a book. I don't know how, or why, or how I'm going to do it, but I am going to do it. All right, I'll make sure she shuts the door.

You have all my linetypes? I'm going to get started. OK?

Yes, that's fine. Thank you.

So we're about halfway through Autodesk U? Or no, this is the first day. I think I'm on Wednesday.

All right, so "Leveraging Linetypes in AutoCAD." My name is Sam Lucido. I'm a CAD Services Manager and a Senior Civil Designer. I worked-- I've been doing this for about 25 years. I started out on the board and then worked my way into Civil 3D, [INAUDIBLE] and all these other different softwares.

I'm not going to go too much into my background. I'm a certified professional an Expert Elite Member. I do a lot of writing for AUGI. I volunteer a lot for them basically because it helps me keep my skills sharp.

And this class is all about fundamentals because I think the more that I manage people in Civil 3D and Plant 3D and Rivet, and all these things, it seems like we forget about the basics and the fundamentals. And linetypes is such a fundamental thing. I have project managers that they want to see all these different linetypes.

And I don't tell my users they can't create a million of them. You can, but there needs-- you need to have some differentiation, and I'll show you a few different ways to do it. And I believe-- my whole thing is if I can teach you one thing today and make you think about it then I've done my job.

So in this class, we're going to talk about simple and complex linetypes. And it is very simple. Simple linetypes are just pieces of code that enable-- it tells AutoCAD to put the pen down, to either put a dot or draw a line at a distance. That's all it is.

Linetypes you can change them by changing their scale on the properties palette which a lot of people do, or you can create new ones. So most importantly, bring back knowledge and help you excel. I forgot I had this.

So what we're going to do. We're going to identify change and create linetype definitions. We're going to start with simple linetype. We're going to show you what it is, what those pieces of code mean to you. You can take Autodesk-- Autodesk has never updated this linetype file. It's been the same for as long as I've been using it. And it's just a text file, but you can take that dash linetype-- you can make 50 of them and just give them different lengths.

We're going to create custom linetypes. We're going to use fonts. And we'll stick with Arial to start. Simplex is a favorite of a lot of people because it takes up less space, and the SHX doesn't have some problems when "PDF-ing." But we're going to use Arial because we're going to use a character map too.

And then we're going to create and compile a complex linetype library using shapes. And you'll see that when you create a shape in AutoCAD, it's just-- it's similar to a block, but it's just this AutoCAD making these definitions of a shape and you bring it in. But when you save it, it saves it to an SHX file, which is the compiled version, and a shapefile, which is this text file.

So and there's a reason-- And you can create 100 different shapes, but what you want to do is you don't want to give your client or people 100 shapes when you put in a drawing so you have to compile it. Simple to do. Not that hard. You just got to be a little organized.

And then at the end, I'm going to show you what I did with my company, and what I've done before is I created-- I put a tool palette. I put them on a tool palette, and I taught a class and macros. And if you look up me two years ago, I did-- there's exercises and workflows that explain how to put pieces of code in macro to put a linetype on there. Because my group-- I have dedicated users.

We have 27 offices throughout the country. So my users-- I have about eight dedicated CoreCAD users, and then there's 50 to 70 people. So I don't need the civil engineer, the geotechnical engineer, structural engineer to care about what layer the linetypes. I just wanted to be right.

So that's why they're on the palette. They load the linetype. They put it on the correct layer, and they draw the line. So they don't have to worry about the code or anything.

Download the handout, and let's get started. I'll just, like I said, I'm going to be-- I'm going to go live in AutoCAD the whole time. Linetype file-- two types, simple and complex. Simple is just this. Complex is that. The only difference is complex uses either fonts or shapes.

And you can see up in here-- I'm going to use my computer. I can't zoom. You can see over in here when it has linetype .SHX. There's like six shapes in there, and that comes with your AutoCAD, Civil 3D, Plant 3D. It comes with it, and that's why. That's a compiled shape library. There's certain programs that can read that SHX file.

All right, so let's go and we're going to start out with the dashed linetype. My simple and my complex linetypes here. And like I said, this-- I'll move this up because-- control, shift A. [INAUDIBLE]

So we've got this linetype SHX here, here, and here. So you can see it's bat, track and box are the shapes that are included within that compiled library. So you can have one called company X and have 100 shapes in there. It doesn't really matter. They have to be in there though.

So what the definitions are-- I'm going to open up my file location. This comes with AutoCAD. You can see, like I said, A, put the pen down-- draw a line, one unit-- bring the pen up-- go another unit-- bring it down.

The ISO1 is just customized for ISO scaling. Those are the two you're going to get. And then we're going to compile some of them. So I'm going to go back out here and go into the dashed outline type and take a look at it really quick, because what I want to do is create a water type. We're going to create a waterline.

So we've got this dashed dot divide LINETYPE. Now, you can load the LINETYPE ISO006. But you got to give it a LINETYPE scale 0.03 to get those dots to look right. So we're just going to create another one. So remember I told you that A is the alignment. I'll go back to PowerPoint. We'll go over that really quick.

A is the alignment. It's required. It's required. And I put in there, you can use an S, because there's a little trick. It's an undocumented command. But it's more for shapes. 0.5 tells AutoCAD you're going to draw a line 0.5 units. 0.12, it's lifting the pen up. You're going to put a space.

And then in the sequence of brackets here, this would be a complex LINETYPE. There's a letter A. That's the style-- the font you need. The height of a LINETYPE, a text in the LINETYPE. Rotation angle, x offset, y offset. The upright variable, which was added in 2014 where your font will always be upright to the bottom of the page.

So you'll get old LINETYPES from people and they'll be flipped upside down. The only caveat is if your UCS is rotated, that's when that can change. And then 0.12 to put the pen back down, then repeat the pattern. I wanted to explain that really quick before we start creating them.

So we'll go back to AutoCAD. We've got this divide LINETYPE. So what do we have here? We have an A which is the alignment. We're going to draw a line 0.5 units. 0.25 is a space. Zero is a dot. So the only thing I need to do to make a LINETYPE with three dots is repeat this one more time.

So what I'm going to do is, we can take a look over here. And I'm just going to repeat it one more time. I'm going to come out here and open up my file location and look at the waterline. So I took divide times 2-- this one right here. And I came down here. And I called this one water.

And let's copy it again. Let's just copy it and try something different-- add one more dot. I'm going to paste that. And then I'm going to hit a comma, zero for another dot-- negative 0.25. You notice I'm just using Notepad-- one. And then I'll just put a dot here for visual representation.

I'm going to save it-- go back to my drawing-- LINETYPE. I'm going to load it. It might ask me to reload it. And you can see I've got these two in here. So I'm just going to right-click, Select them all, hit OK, reload them all, and hit OK. And let's draw a line and see what they look like.

Control 1 for my Properties palette. So we've got this one here. We'll change it to the water. See how we have the three dots. And then we'll do the other one-- four dots. It's 0.5. This is 0.5. If I was to put the dimension on it, that's 0.5, the space, and then the 0, 0, 0. So you could go on and on.

It's a good way to control the LINETYPES. You can create a bunch of them. What's good about not having the font in there or the shape is, this is universally read through anybody's machine when you create them this way. So we did the waterline from there. So you can do-- and you can see.

And by changing the LINETYPE scale, you can actually change up in here if you wanted it a little tighter. So that's how I like to do the waterline LINETYPE. I mean, I don't know why it's not in there. But you can tell Autodesk doesn't have very many in there. But all's I did was copy.

Now, let's do the same thing for a dash line. Let's see how that reacts and create one called Dash Three or something like that. So I'm going to go back to my dash LINETYPE. And you'll see that here's a dash LINETYPE. So I'm going to erase this just so we can see.

And you can see 0.5, 1.25, and that. So we're going to just draw a line. Let's draw a line three units in length. I'm going to right-click. I love this right-click and open file location. I use to use a [INAUDIBLE] to go out and do that. I love being able to get out of my files.

I'm just going to go to waterline again. See, see we've got this dash times 2. Or we're just a dash. So we're going to copy this. And we're call it dash 3, 3. And I'm just going to change this to 1 and 0.5. Anything after this is just going to repeat. I'm going to save the LINETYPE again-- hit Save. I'm going to LINETYPE load it.

I might be boring you with these simple ones. But we have to go through the simple ones first. So there's the dash three. I have two of them in there-- Hit OK. And then I'm going to change my LINETYPE to dash three. And you can see now that it's a one unit in length.

So that's why it stops after the code-- the length of the line. It's going to try to determine based on that distance. So basically, that's all you have to do for lines. And it's dots and lines. You can go through and create a bunch of them. We have construction limits that are really small dashes. But they're thicker. And that's how we do that one.

So let's go to fonts now. See, now, you notice I haven't used the Make LINETYPE command or the MKSHAPE command-- haven't done that yet. You can do that. You can do the same thing. It'll create editing that text file so simple. And I'll show you how it is with these lines.

We're going to create three LINETYPES. We're going to create an air supply line and air flow line and an air suppliers line-- so one letter, two letters, three letters. So let me go out here. And the first thing I need to do-- you notice that this right here-- this AU lines is my style.

So I'm going to have to create a style called AU Lines if it's not in there. Otherwise, what's going to happen-- the reason I don't include-- and we'll get to this when we start doing the alphabet. With 1,000 LINETYPES in your file, if you get that error that says, cannot load LINETYPE-- bad definition, you have to go through it however many lines are in that piece of code.

If there's 50, you're going to have to cancel, cancel, cancel 50 there. You can't just get out of it. And it won't let you do it. So we're going to take the aerial. And we're going to create a new one. And we're going to call it AU Lines.

I don't want to give it a Hyatt or make it annotated, because it's just the LINETYPE. So now what I'm going to do is actually just do an MTEXT and just do it in there and do A. Let's look at the height. Oh, let's make it 0.1. And let's change this to middle center.

And let's draw a line one unit in length. I'm going to take this since I have a middle center. And I have a grip there. I'm going to move my font to the center of there. And then what I'm going to do is explode it and make it dynamic text. I could have just did D text. I wanted to show you that you can't use MTEXT. It won't work.

So I'm going to explode it. I'm going to trim it. And if this-- not like that-- trim right here like that. You see how it's a certain 0.421-- normally, I'd make it like an even number so the code doesn't look crazy. But this will get me what I want to need.

So what I'm going to do is go out to Express tab on the ribbon underneath Tools. And I'm going to go Make LINETYPE. It's going to come out here and say, Sam, where do you want to put this LINETYPE file? I'm going to say in here. So I'm just going to leave it at air lines.

And if you can say I have one or two already in there I was testing, I'm going to hit Save. Enter the LINETYPE name-- Air. LINETYPE definition-- Air line. Starting point will be the end point of this. Ending point is going to be the end point of this line right here, because the pattern will repeat.

I'm going to select this, select this. It's going to say, Air Created. I'm going to right-click. I'm going to go out. Let's take a look at that. Air line types-- so here we go. So we've got this LINETYPE in here. And I could come up in here, do a couple semicolons and saying, My Air lines created by blah, blah, blah so the person knows you created these LINETYPES. And you'll see the distances there.

I would, in a normal circumstance, as I probably change this just 0.25, 0.43, and go from there. And you see the rest of this-- the y offset and the x offset is based off the font. So I'm saving it. So let's load it and see what it does.

There's my airline. Now, I didn't go-- there's no definition behind it. And I'll show you real quick. So I'm going to hit OK. Hit OK. And if I draw a line, let's do a circle so I can show you the upright variable at this properties-- chu-chu-chu-chu-- chu-- air. So you see how that works?

Now, we're going to do it a couple more times. And then I'm going to show you how to copy them real quick into more than that. So I've already got my A, right? So I'm going to move this down, move this down. I want AS. Actually, let's copy the whole thing so I have the distance of the three fonts.

1, 2, 3-- Air Sparge line-- air-- Well, Air Supply and then Air Sparge. And then I'm just going to move these for now kind of eyeball. I'm going to do the Make LINETYPE of command. This is important right here. I'm going to do it at the Command prompt. But I'll go up here-- Make LINETYPE.

I'm going to select the same one I just used. And it's going to say, Sam, are you crazy? You want to overwrite it. Don't worry about it-- hit Yes. It's just going to uphend it to the end. It's the same with shapes and sizes. So it's going to say, Enter the LINETYPE name. This will be Air Supply-- oops-- Make LINETYPE.

Let's do this again-- Save-- Yes, LINETYPE Name, AS. LINETYPE description-- Air Supply. Starting point of the definition is the end point of here. End point definition is there-- 1, 2-- AS created. Make LINETYPE again-- Save. LINETYPE name-- ASG-- Air Sparge Line.

Starting point is the end point of here. I'm using my [? Kemma ?] keyboard guy. I could hold down my Shift key and get the end point of here-- 1, 2, created. 1, 2, 3-- LINETYPE-- load-- file. Here are LINETYPES. This places list over here is controlled in the profile. I love it.

It's great when you're doing anything, even in projects. So we got all three of them there. I'm going to right-click. I'm going to Select All. I'm going to reload there, hit OK. And then I'm going to check them out here and see what they look like.

So I've got the Airline is our first one. The Air Supply line is my second one. And the Air Sparge line is my third one. Pretty simple, hey? Now, what makes it even simpler is once you figure out my company uses a Roman's font with a 0.9-- whatever that is-- once you figure all that out, you right-click. You open the file locations.

And I'm going to go in my air line types-- want to say, well, you know what-- I already know the distance of the A. I already know the distance of the two fonts and three. So let's do some sewers. So I'm going to copy this. I'm going to put a spacebar or paste it.

I'm going to edit it this way. So I'm going to type S for sewer, sewer line. The definition behind it is where this would be how it does that. I'll show you the other ones once I get done with this one. And then on here is the font S. I would change it to here.

And then let's do this one-- SS for Storm Sewer. SS-- and then this will be a sanitary sewer for SAN. SAN-- sanitary. OK, did I do everything right? I got them all, hit Close-- hit Yes-- get out of here. LINETYPE-- load-- want to go to the file.

I always reload them all just for the heck of it. See, there's my three new ones-- hit OK. They're in there. Let's copy this over a little bit. Sewer-- S-- Storm Sewer-- SS-- and Sanitary Sewer. So there you go.

That's all I could do. And you know what-- there's a little trick to doing like the [INAUDIBLE]. And I'll show you that at the end. But you can go ahead. And once you create your distances between that fo-- it's when you change the style of the font.

Now, if I changed my style-- if that's the reason why you create a unique style name, like this one's called AU lines, a lot of people don't leave it to standard, because you'll get a file from a client. And they might change the standard to a height or something like that.

Anyway, so my point was with this-- so why not, potentially, when I talk to my team at work-- what I did was, when I first did this, we figured out, OK, we talked to everybody. We figured out what was the best distances for the lines. In the majority of our drawings, what was the best distances?

And we took the letter A. And we did the whole alphabet. We did the whole thing. But we don't include them all in the palettes at the end. We only include the common ones we need. But the other ones are there. So then there's blank ones that we didn't have letters for, names for, like y or something like that.

But as long as the code's in there-- as long as you have that SAN-- if you have HDPE, all's you have to do is change that last distance on the end and make it a little wider for the pen to go up. And that's, quote, unquote, "that's a complex LINETYPE." It really is not.

But like, when you look at some of these other ones, you can see, now, let's look at the definitions of the actual. You see, underneath it here, there's a comma. This is when you kind of define what they look like. So when I load it, at least, the user can see kind of, hey, look, I know what I'm getting into-- give it a definition.

But on the Make LINETYPE command, you have to edit it via a text editor. All right, so those are your text ones. So let's talk about using the character map now. And it's important with true type fonts.

AUDIENCE: Do you always create them in one-one-one [INAUDIBLE] scale?

SAM LUCIDO: Yeah, because LINETYPES-- there's system variables that control LINETYPES. There's MSLT scale. There's PSLT scale. There's CELT scale. Now, to make a LINETYPE, quote, unquote, "annotative," then you do that, like Katie King always say-- you do that LINETYPE dance where you go in a model space, and nothing shows up, right?

If your LINETYPE doesn't show up in model space-- your MSLT scale-- your model space LINETYPE scale needs to be set to 1 and then change your annotation scale to what it is in your drawing. And your LINETYPE will show up just fine.

AUDIENCE: Will you create the line type definition at--

SAM LUCIDO: At one-to-one. Yeah.

AUDIENCE: Do you always use the line, or can you use [INAUDIBLE]?

SAM LUCIDO: Use a line.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

SAM LUCIDO: No, no, you don't. You're going to getting into shapes when you do that. You can't use a P line to make it thick. OK, what I've done is-- and we'll talk about that when we get-- let's talk about how we get the shapes, cause what we can do is, we can create like a shape-- a solid, like, thick like a, say, a traffic marker or whatever and then use that shape and then repeat the pattern.

It's just when you get in the curving it is when you have problems. OK, so that's airlines-- character map. We covered the simple LINETYPES, which are simple. You all know that. We covered complex fonts, which in reality is really not that complicated.

Once you get your distances down, the only time it comes complicated is when you put-- we had a job where we had gas lines that were abandoned, removed, replaced. And so they wanted LINETYPES that said, gas with "R" in quotations, RR. There was a bunch of--

We had to change distances. But it's easy enough to do. When I was a guy back in-- I'll tell you, back when I first started working, I've been with Haley & Aldrich for eight years now. But way back when I first started doing LINETYPES, I was so curious. I hated the font thing. I was so against it.

I exploded all my text and created shapes for every piece of text. So you can explode text. You can do it that way. You would be guaranteed that you're never going-- but you'd have to supply that compiled LINETYPE file to that person.

But I switched over since, because it's simple this way. It would made it easier-- made my life easier at work. OK, so what we're going to do is look at the character map really quick. And we're going to call this Path one, Path two, and Clover.

So we're going to do the same thing again. We're going to do MTEXT. So we have a style, E lines. I'm just going to come in here. I'm going to go back out to model space. And I have my line here. And here's the endpoint of my line. I'm going to use this point and this point.

So I'm just going to get a font in there. And we're just going to call it A. But I'm going to right-click. And I'm going to do a symbol and hit Other. An Autocad's going to think about what I just did. And I'm going to come down with the Arial font. I'm going to come way down here and kind of look at some arrows.

So I want this arrow, Select, Copy, right-click, Paste. [RINGING] I'm going to do the same thing again-- Symbol, Other. Remember, we're still in the Arial font. We're not in the Wingding thing yet. [CLICKING] What do you want to do? Let's do this one the other way-- Select, Copy-- Paste.

And I put Clover there, because I must have been thinking about St. Patrick's Day or something. I think it's down here somewhere to Clover-- [CLICKING] There we go-- Select, Copy-- Paste. OK. I have text objects. I'm just going to explode. Again, I could have used DTEXT. But using a true type font, it can do that.

I'm going to use my Properties palette to change these all to the middle center. Let's do middle left so I can kind of put it in the end there. And I'm going to make them a height of 0.1 again. Let's do 0.2. They look kind of small. And you could test this out. Your height is your height.

So I'm going to take this here. I'm going to drop it on the end point here. I'm going to take this one here. I'm going to drop it on the endpoint here-- and take this one-- drop it on the endpoint here. And then I'm going to move them all a little bit over-- turn my ortho on.

Isn't that great that they took away the text down here for the status bar? [LAUGHS] Does anybody really know what all you-- Did you ever test your users and say, hey, do you know what all these are? I wanted to make a bookmark at one time, because I thought it'd be really cool. Because of that, every time I go down there, I try to look at it.

Anyway, I'm going to select that Clover. I'm going to make a little bit bigger and move it because the way that is. So we have three new lines. So we're going to do a Path one, Path two, and Clover. So again, Make LINETYPE command. And we're over here on Character Map. And I'm just going to call this Character Map.

I'm just going to do C Map so I know the difference. That's my LINETYPE file. Enter the LINETYPE name is Path One. The LINETYPE name has to be a continuous name. You can't have any spaces in there. So you've got to name it kind of like Sanitary Sewer SAN and then give it the definition. So we'll do Path One-- hit Enter, Definition-- arrow right.

Starting point is an end point of here, Ending point is the end point of here. I just did it a different way-- Select, Select, Path One created. Make LINETYPE again. I'm going to select this, hit Save again. Remember, it's not going to delete it. It's just going to put it on the end of it.

Path two-- arrow left-- end point, end point-- select, select. And then Clover Make LINETYPE. Let's see. Clover. OK, let's do this again. Remember, my style has to be in my drawing. Well, let's do this. Let's do this just so you can see.

I'm going to rename this to E lines 1. And it closed. And I want to try to load those LINETYPES. [RINGING] Watch-- 1, 2, 3. So think about it before you put 150,000 LINETYPES in one file. I don't know. Does anybody know? You can't cancel that.

AUDIENCE: Sit, hold, Enter. And it keeps going. And then it will be--

SAM LUCIDO: If you sit and hold the Enter key, it'll just--

AUDIENCE: It'll go through all of--

SAM LUCIDO: So you made 1,000 line types.

AUDIENCE: I made--

SAM LUCIDO: A lot. [LAUGHS]

AUDIENCE: But then it will just re-enter the LT command and you're good.

SAM LUCIDO: I wish you could cancel out of there, because it's happened to me so many times in client files. I'll get into a drawing. And it won't have the LINETYPE style in there. But they're all there. Maybe they're still readable. And I'll try to load it. And I'm like, ah, no.

But anyway, so let's rename that style back. Or I could change it. Hit OK. Close, and let's load the lines again. Only reason I have them in there is because I practice-- Select All, hit OK. [RINGING]. OK, so we've got our path one. These are nice for arrows.

If you have ditch flows or water flows and path to-- well, I was losing my train of thought there, because I was going to actually show you how to do two of them and then the Clover. The Clover is just there to kind of show you what you can do. Instead of a shape, you can actually use a font.

AUDIENCE: Depends if you want arrows pointing all of this direction instead of changing it [INAUDIBLE].

SAM LUCIDO: You change an upright variable-- just don't put it in there-- eliminate it. That's a good question. If we have time, we'll try it. Have you tried it?

AUDIENCE: Yeah, I had to use it for a live to show [INAUDIBLE].

SAM LUCIDO: So you just didn't put the upright variable. And it just stayed in one direction.

AUDIENCE: Yeah.

SAM LUCIDO: And then you can type reverse and reverse it.

AUDIENCE: So yeah. It's like with [INAUDIBLE] which way it was going to all my [INAUDIBLE].

SAM LUCIDO: Yeah. So what he's talking about-- what's your name?

AUDIENCE: DJ.

SAM LUCIDO: DJ-- what DJ's saying is what we need to do is, under the C map here, remove this right here-- just remove it-- hit Save. And then we reload and then the path-- should we try it?

AUDIENCE: Think so. You guys go over--

SAM LUCIDO: We're not going to try it. Should we try it?

AUDIENCE: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

SAM LUCIDO: The consensus says to try it. Let's do it for all three.

AUDIENCE: It's not supposed to do it.

SAM LUCIDO: No, it's not. It's just up.

AUDIENCE: You want me to do it. Now, you [INAUDIBLE] view-- think that's below-- looked up last minute-- think it's that-- what was it?

SAM LUCIDO: So this will force the font to go in one direction. So watch when I load the LINETYPE, it's going to actually cha-- this should change. So Line Type, Load, File. It's going to ask me to reload them all, select them all-- [RINGING] hit OK, Regenerate-- see that?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

SAM LUCIDO: So they're all going in one direction. Dang, I already gave you a prize.

AUDIENCE: It's all right.

SAM LUCIDO: You need another one.

AUDIENCE: What happens if you set it to one? [INAUDIBLE].

SAM LUCIDO: There's only a zero as far as I know. It's an upright variable. You have to set it to zero. It's zero. It was brought in 2014. It's actually really cool, because of the way of the fonts. But in that case, that's a perfect example of why you don't want it.

It's a perfect example, because you could go like that. And then your arrow would change. Using a character-- now, shapes are different. Shapes are a different animal. OK, so that's character map-- man, I'm going slow. But anyway, I like questions, though. They're good.

So let's do the Wingdings font. So if you look underneath the care of the wings dings, right? There's so many symbols and characters on there. I had a friend create all kinds of LINETYPES with using shapes and characters from Wingdings. All you need again is another style.

So in this case, I created a style called Winglines. And it's the Wingdings font. That's all it is. So what we're going to do is actually do MTEXT again. And you'll see over here-- I'll go through this one quick. It's the letter J is the smiley face. C is thumbs up, and M is the TNT.

I know I was kind of reluctant to do the bomb thing. [LAUGHS] I know. I was almost changed it. I was like, I said it's a LINETYPE. But anyway. So-- yeah.

[LAUGHS]

AUDIENCE: Don't take it for--

SAM LUCIDO: Huh?

AUDIENCE: Don't take it over a [INAUDIBLE].

SAM LUCIDO: Yeah. Oh, man, you guys are killing me, so Style, Wingline. So I'm going to do text again. I could do DTEXT. And this is J, C, and M. And I'm going to leave it for now.

You're going to get the same reaction from these as you would the other ones. So two-- and I'm just going to move-- I'm going to explode them and move them. I'm not going to get real technical just because of time.

OK, Make LINETYPE. Express Panel on the ribbon, Express Tools on the ribbon underneath this panel here-- the Tools panel-- Make LINETYPE. And we're going to call this one the Winglines. [CLICKING] And I'll just do wings. I should have deleted those before I started the class.

LINETYPE name-- Smile with Me, end point, end point, select, select. Did I explode that? OK, Make LINETYPE again-- save it to the exact same file-- Thumbsup. You notice how it's got to be one word-- Thumbsup-- description-- good job.

And then the last one would be the TNT. Save, Yes, TNT. I got ahead of myself there-- end point and end point. And you don't have to do like I do like that and all the end point, end point stuff. So again, circle, circle, circle, LINETYPE, load.

You can see it's already in there. But we're going to reload it. Winglines, Wings, Open, Select All, hit OK, reload them all, hit OK. Smile-- zoom in-- thumbs up-- TNT. Wouldn't you like to put some of those on your drawings on-- give it to somebody?

You've got to have the right person, though-- got to have the right person. Trust me, I work in a big firm. The wrong guy or gal can go real wrong real fast. But anyway, that shows you if I go into my style underneath Wingdings. Let's just do MTEXT so I can show you real quick.

If you just start typing all these characters, you have a lot of options up to do a lot of different things. Now, whether I've used this teardrop. I've used the diamond and a few other shapes that are pretty good that aren't so bad.

So that covers LINETYPES with special characters, LINETYPES of the Wingding fonts. And now we're going to move on to shapes, because shapes are pretty cool what you can do with them. So we've got about 20 minutes left. And then I do want to show you that little video.

So this is what I'll give you. And I'll show you my trick behind this. And you'll notice that when I did in the handout, or when I was promoting the class, I was just having fun seeing if I could make footsteps-- if I could make a multicolored line. These are all done with shapes-- boiling water-- this limits of waste.

There's some arrows there, like you were saying with the path, DJ. Stars-- these are shapes. But the silt fencing-- that's two shapes combined into one. So let's go into the objects. And this is how you create shapes. So I'm going to show you-- these are objects in AutoCAD. And you see what I did? Let's go over to my shape one first.

This is just an object that I created. Now, you have to do make shape. Again, under this tool here, a make shape. And we're going to call this pointer. I'm just going to leave it here for now just to show you. No, I better put it in here. I want to show you what it looks like-- shapes, points and then enter the name of the shape.

It's kind of like the LINETYPE. You've got to give it the name of the file. And then inside that file, you have to give it the name of the shape. It'll be a one. And then I'll show you the code. And then you do the insertion point. And you select this LINETYPE-- so [? 0.128 ?] for the resolu-- you can go higher. I don't recommend it.

These are going to be small. They're not going to be giant in any of these shapes. 128 base point-- we're going to go right there. And then we're going to select these objects. I'm going to hold down my Shift key to deselect the things I don't want. And I made a shape.

OK. So now, let's take a look at what the shape bottle looks like. That's a shape file. AutoCAD Bible came out like a few years ago. But it tells exactly what those numbers mean if their angles and letters that create the shape. So you can see that this one, that drop had that much piece of code in there.

Let's go to the pointer one and show the code for that one. See what I mean? It's a little bit different of a shape. And what you want to do is get all of these shapes into one file and then compile it, because you don't want to give everybody all the shapes.

And how do you do that? Just like the LINETYPE command, if I make this into a shape-- and notice what I did here? I hatched it. But I had to explode the hatch. It will not read hatch pattern. So you have to somehow make it solid. And these are pretty small. This is an 8 by 8 little grid. And they're pretty small.

So this will be in the data set. And what I did if you go over here-- I'll show my trick. So I made all these shapes. And you see how it's a field? This is how I do my symbols, my styles-- everything-- so I know what it is. I know that this shape is a pointer, because when I do the field here, I select it. I select the object.

It's going to tell me-- let me move that. I like the MTEXT toolbar. You laughed. I like that thing. You can turn it on and off.

AUDIENCE: I like it too.

SAM LUCIDO: --one and zero, on and off. Anyway, so I double-click it. I select the object. And it's going to say it's a shape. And I hit Name. And It's going to say pointer and hit OK. If I rename that shape to something else for some, whatever reason-- shapes-- well, I'm not going to do that around.

But anyway, if I did rename it, it's all there. But anyway, this will tell you exactly what the names of these shapes are. So when you create your LINETYPES of shapes, you're going to be able to know what they are. And they're just placed in here. OK, so let's create a couple LINETYPES with shape and then a ditch full of line too.

So we have three shapes here. So you have a circle, a triangle, and a square. So I'm going to do the Make Shape command now. And we're going to go under here and do three shapes. And we're going to call this Solid Circle. I'm just going to call it SC for it to be quick here and Solid Circ SC. And then resolution is that.

Insertion base point would be the center of that shape-- hit Enter, Enter. Shape was created and placed into my drawing. Make shape again. I'm going to do ST for a triangle for solid. In the handout, I type the whole thing out.

ST Resolution 128-- the base point I'm going to use at the end point there. Shape created placed to my drawing. One more time, make shape-- SQ for the square. I'm going to save it-- SQ. Resolution 128-- the base point there, square, Enter. OK, got these blank lines here.

So let's not compile the library yet. Let's just look at how we're going do this. I take shape at the command prompt. And I'm going to do SC. And I'm going to just select right in there. I'm going to do ST-- select right in there and then SQ for square-- select right in there.

And let's do one more just for fun. The versatility of shapes-- so I'm going to turn my ortho on. I'm going to pull this over just a little bit. And I would type Shape. And I'm going to do SC for the circle. I'm going to select right there. But what I'm going to do is actually scale that down a little bit.

So one thing about shapes, you can't really select the center point-- 0.2-- move it-- 2, 3, OK? You get what I'm getting at with the shapes of duplicates? I could do the silt fence one, too. But that's an arc. So now, we're going to use the Make LINETYPE command and do the same thing. This is where you need the line.

I'll show you what had happened. So we're going to use Make LINETYPE command. And we'll do two of them-- bear with me a second. All righty, Make LINETYPE type command. [INAUDIBLE]-- Save. LINETYPE name is-- just call it SC and circle-- Solid Circle.

End point, end point, this one, this one-- Make LINETYPE command. I'm going to select the same line again like I did. I'm going to call this one Ditch Flow-- Ditch Flow line. Starting point is here. Ending point is here-- select my objects-- here-- here.