From:    Rob Brown 
Subject: Christmas toys  (AccuDraw)
Date:    Thu, 18 Dec 1997

Okay I promised a xmas present for my newsgroup friends, so here it is
(windows version only right now, sorry).  Two things to make your accudraw
experience a little merrier.  Or at least a bit less annoying.

The first is the much requested "put accudraw on hold" thing.  New shortcut
<H>:  enter it and accudraw will take a short coffee break until the next
datapoint is entered.  Press it again if you want your accudraw back before
that.  There's still a place for the <L> shortcut, and for being able to
permanently turn off axis and distance indexing, but this one's the one
everyone seems to want (and it was a two-liner!).

So stop complaining already! :-)

The second is shortcut <RE> for "Rotate to Element".  This will rotate
accudraw to an element (duh), which is often quicker than <RA> or <RQ>.
There are two tool-settings options:

"Move origin":  if checked, in addition to rotating, accudraw's compass will
move to the closest anchor point on the selected element,

"Temporary rotation":  if checked, the rotation will only stay in effect
till a new command starts (similar to <RQ>), if not checked, it will use the
current ACS (like <RA>).

This little tool should be pretty easy to figure out, since it uses dynamic
location, something I've been experimenting with (along with doing element
location in a "viewing" command).  It works pretty good on my machine and
files, but it may go slow  (the cursor might hang) on big files and slow
machines.  Let me know if this is the case and you'd prefer more traditional
locate technology.  I'm not saying I'll change it, but let me know anyway.
:-)

The way it figures out how to rotate is pretty straightforward.  Just move
the cursor over elements and when you like what you see, click.  You can hit
reset to look for another element under the cursor.  It is dynamically
sensitive to where the cursor is so don't move the cursor away if you want
to use the hilited element.  Don't expect it to do anything too meaningful
on bspline curves and surfaces (it'll do SOMETHING though).

To install, put the application in mdlsys\required (or otherwise make sure
it will automatically load at startup).  Then edit your shortcuts to add the
following:

RE    "Rotate to Element"  "accudraw rotate element"
H     "On Hold"            "accudraw suspend"

I suggest editing data\shortcuts.txt with notepad and putting them in a
logical place in the list (<RE> should be after <RA>, right?).   (if you
have the SE version of accudraw you don't need to edit the text file to
insert a new shortcut in the middle of the list).  Sorry I didn't actually
install the new shortcuts myself, but even that is kind of hard to do once
accudraw is running unless you have the SE version.

Enjoy, and merry christmas everyone!
(and thanks for the idea Chris and Thomas)

-rob
rob.brown@mindspring.com