3 Great Viewport Tips - Rotate a View, Viewport visual Aid and Magic Text

In this blog and video, I give 3 great tips for rotating the contents of AutoCAD viewport when using Lt.

• How to Rotate a viewport -The settings you need to change.
• A Viewport Visual Aid - Instantly see which viewports are rotated.
• Magic Text - Keeping text readable even after rotating.

How to rotate Viewport contents in AutoCAD Lt

1. At the Command prompt, enter VPROTATEASSOC.
2. Set the value to 1.
3. Copy an existing viewport.
4. Pan the viewport to the part of the building to be included.
5. Remember to lock up the viewports.
6. Select the viewport with the view you want to rotate.
7. Enter RO (Rotate) to rotate the view to a specified angle.
8. Specify a base point for the rotation.
9. Specify the rotation angle or using the Reference option, specify a reference line by clicking on the ends of a line and use this to rotate and determine the angle of rotation. The entire view rotates within the viewport.

Note:
When VPROTATEASSOC is set to 0, the view within the viewport is not rotated when the viewport is rotated.

Tidy the viewport

Rotating a viewport to a non-uniform angle can leave it a bit untidy, even though it does not matter as the viewports are on a non-printing layer, our layout looks 

messy so we can change the shape of the viewport simply by dragging the corner grips around, making good use of object snap tracking, to make our view port square again.

Rotated viewport visual aid.

You may have noticed that the rotated viewport itself looks different, it has become a dashed line instead of continuous. This is not normal behaviour for AutoCAD; it is a feature of the Viewport layer, and what’s interesting here is that line type styles do not normally display on regular rectangular viewports however when rotated they will adopt the layers’ line style. It’s worth noting that this feature is only on rectangular viewports, polygonal viewports will immediately adopt the layers’ line style.
Whether this is intentional by Autodesk or not, we can use this as a handy visual aid to instantly know which views have been rotated.

Maintain Text Orientation Relative to Layout

Look closer at the notes and from the regular non-rotated view to the rotated view, magically, the text has remained horizontal, it has not rotated with the building geometry in the building.
In the Text Style Manager, an annotative text style can be set to "match text orientation to layout" - in other words, no matter what the angle of your view is, the text will always stay horizontal.

This property can also be set on the fly for individual annotative text objects. When it's set to Yes, you can see that the Rotation property has been grayed out, because the orientation is now determined by the view angle.

This ability to change how we can see parts of a building, or a mechanical object, can help us communicate our designs in a way that makes it easier for our audience to understand our design intent to aid discussion and agreement to a desired goal for everyone involved.

If you've enjoyed this small tutorial, and would like to learn more about AutoCAD LT, Why not subscribe to one of our Autodesk Certified AutoCAD Training Courses? Get in touch with us at 023 8086 8947 or by following the link below: