Editing Objects with AutoCAD - Section 4

CHAPTER 17: SIMPLE EDITION

There are editing tasks that are common to many computer programs. We all know, for example, of the options Copy, Cut and Paste of almost all programs. However, as it is easy to understand, these tasks are unique when dealing with drawing objects in a program such as Autocad. For this reason we can not ignore the revision of commands such as Copy or Delete, even though they are really very simple.
Therefore, let us quickly study these simple editing commands to advance as quickly as possible to new topics.

17.1 Copy

As the name implies, the Copy command allows you to copy an object or a selection set. To execute it, we can use the button on the ribbon or invoke the command Copy in the window. In any case, Autocad asks us to designate the objects to be copied if we did not do so before starting the command. Once the object or objects have been selected, then we must indicate a base point that will serve as reference to locate the copy, it can be said here that the base point does not necessarily have to touch the object. Finally, we must indicate a second point in which the copy will be located.

As you will have noticed, once the objects have been selected, and before indicating the base point, we have three options that we must mention: Displacement, Manual and Multiple.
Shift takes the position of the object with respect to the origin and allows you to specify a point for the new position of the copy. Multiple and Multiple are redundant options. If we select mOdo we will get its Simple and Multiple suboptions, the latter is equivalent to the first option and allows to activate the creation of multiple copies of the object with a single execution of the command.

Note that these options appear when a base point has not yet been specified. In turn, when specifying a base point and before indicating the second point, we have a new option called Matrix, which allows you to create a linear array of objects. We must indicate the number of objects. The second point on the screen determines the distance and direction of the first copy from the original object, the rest of the elements of the matrix are located at the same distance and linear direction as the first copy, although it has a last option called Adjust where , instead of locating the first copy, it allows to locate in the second point the last copy of the matrix. In this case, the rest of the objects will be distributed equidistantly from the original.

Now, if you want to copy one or several objects from one drawing to another, or even from Autocad to another application, then what you should use are the corresponding commands in the Clipboard section, which will place the objects in the memory from the computer to be called later by the Paste option. If we are doing this action to copy objects from one Autocad drawing to another, then it may be convenient for one of the variants that this command has in turn.

It can be said that the objects reside in the clipboard until other objects or objects replace them.