The following Tutorial is a translation, by Joe Biddy, of an article which appeared in the December, 1994 issue of the Inside AutoCAD Journal, published monthly by the Cobb Group. For information on obtaining this issue or subscribing to Inside AutoCAD, follow the LINK at the end of this Tutorial.

Creating Non-rectangular Viewports in Paper Space




Figure 1.

Goals in this Tutorial

When you open HOUSEPLN.DWG, you will see a typical 2D drawing of a house plan. The rectangular shape of the drawing allows no space in the corners to make annotations. Our GOAL in this Tutorial is to create a paper space view that looks like the one in Figure 1. above.

Setting up

Open the drawing file HOUSEPLN.DWG, which resides in the SAMPLE directory. Change the SNAP setting to 1" by typing SNAP, hitting ENTER, typing 1, and hitting ENTER. Create a NEW layer named VPORTS to hold your viewport entities. Type LAYER, hit ENTER, type M, hit ENTER, type VPORTS, and hit ENTER twice. Switch to Paper Space by typing TILEMODE, hit ENTER, type 0 (zero), and hit ENTER.

Creating the Viewport

At this point the screen will appear BLANK. Now let's create the Viewport! Type MVIEW, hit ENTER, type 1,1(first corner) hit ENTER, type 11,8(opposite corner) and hit ENTER. AutoCAD will draw a rectangular viewport and draw the Model Space entities inside the Viewport, as shown in Figure 2. below.

Figure 2.

You may notice that the Model Space view is not centered in the Paper Space Viewport. You can remedy this by using the Commands below:

MS (ENTER)Changes to Model Space
Z (ENTER) E (ENTER)ZOOMs to Extents
Z (ENTER) 0.95X (ENTER)ZOOMs to Scale of 0.95
PS (ENTER)Changes to Paper Space

Now the screen should resemble Figure 3. below.

Figure 3.

Constructing the Non-rectangular Viewport

To change a rectangular viewport like the one in Figure 3. above, into a non-rectangular viewport, requires a series of steps. First, you duplicate the viewport, then you use GRIPS to resize the original and the duplicate viewport.

Duplicating the Viewport

To duplicate the Viewport, type COPY, hit ENTER, click on the viewport to select it, hit ENTER, type 0,0 (for displacement), hit ENTER twice. AutoCAD will now regenerate all of the entities in the duplicate viewport on top of the entities in the original viewport. This may take a minute or so depending on the speed of your machine. The screen will STILL appear as shown in Figure 3. above.

Resizing the Viewports

Now let's resize the Viewports so they do not overlap! Make sure ORTHO and SNAP modes are ON. Next, click on the Viewport to display the GRIPS. Click again on the LOWER LEFT GRIP, it will change to a solid color (usually RED) then, DRAG the GRIP upward from P1 to P2, two inches, as shown in Figure 4. below.

Figure 4.

Next, click on the remaining GRIP at P1 and DRAG it to the RIGHT to P3, three inches, as shown in Figure 5. below.

Figure 5.

To finish the resizing of the Viewports, hit CONTROL C twice to clear the GRIPS from the screen. Next, click on the LOWER RIGHT corner of the Viewport to turn on the GRIPS. Then, click on the UPPER RIGHT GRIP to change it to a solid color and DRAG it from P4, downward to P5, five inches, as shown in Figure 6. below.

Figure 6.

Now the Viewports no longer overlap. The only telltale detail is the visible Viewport entities. To remedy this, type LAYER, hit ENTER, type S, hit ENTER, type 0 (zero), hit ENTER, type OFF, hit ENTER, type VPORTS, and hit ENTER twice. Your screen should resemble Figure 7. shown below.

Figure 7.

Finishing Up

You can use the LINE command to draw a border where the cropped area appears in the LOWER LEFT part of the drawing, as shown in Figure 8. below.

Figure 8.

Conclusion

In this Tutorial we combined two viewports to create an "L" shaped viewport. This technique can be expanded to create a viewport of almost any shape.


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