A Quick and Dirty Tip : A DRAWORDER alternative

Bangalore, India

The DRAWORDER command in AutoCAD and Bricscad can be used to change the order of drawing of entities.

By default entities are (re)drawn in the order in which were added to the DWG: new entities are added at the back of the file, hence they are drawn last. This means they are drawn on top of previously added entities.

The DRAWORDER command allows to modify this default behavior.

Select the entity or entities you want to change the draworder of, then right click and choose Draw Order in the context menu. In the flyout menu choose the appropriate option: Bring to Front, Send to Back, Move Forward, Move Backward.

However, the DRAWORDER command is not a keyboard shortcut command and involves making two entity selections and choosing from a bunch of prompted options and having to make Front/Back/Send/Bring choices based on what you picked first and what you picked next. Not very easy?

A simple alternative is welcome. That is where this Quick-And-Dirty-Tip will come in handy. A simple trick to bring entities on top without having to rely on DRAWORDER is described below:

1. Select the entity or entities.
2. Press Ctrl X to cut the selection and copy it to the clipboard.
3. Press Ctrl V; the selection is attached to the crosshairs.
4. Press the ENTER key to paste the entities at their original location.

The pasted entities become the latest or 'youngest' entities, and therefore sit on top off 'older' entities. You can perform all of this with an easy click of your mouse and a Ctrl-X, Ctrl-V sequence. Isn't that easier than having to fiddle with the DRAWORDER command?

By the way, you can employ this trick in AutoCAD also.

(Acknowledgements: Some inputs taken from www.bricsys.com knowledge-base articles)

Reproduced with permission on http://blog.bricsys.com .

Please do not reproduce on another blog/web-site without having sought explicit permission from the author. Instead, you may provide a hyper-link to this article from your blog.

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Comments

[james Maeding]

note that cut and paste kills grouping, as well as xrecord data for lwpolylines.