Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
Grab It
Part of AutoCAD's editing flexibility comes from its object-selection flexibility. For ex-
ample, command-first editing offers 16 selection modes! (I describe the most useful ones
in this chapter.) Don't worry, though; you can get by most of the time with three selec-
tion modes, each of which I describe in this section:
Selecting a single object by picking it
Selecting multiple objects by enclosing them in a
window
selection box or polygon
Selecting multiple objects by enclosing them in a
crossing
selection box or polygon
One-by-one selection
The most obvious way to select objects is to pick (by clicking) them one at a time. One
or more objects that are selected and ready for editing are called a
selection set.
You can
build a selection set cumulatively with this pick-one-object-at-a-time selection mode, but
this cumulative convention may be different from what you're used to. In most Windows
programs, if you select one object and then another, the first object is
de
selected, and
the second one selected; only the object you select last remains selected. In AutoCAD,
all
the objects you select, one at a time, remain selected and are added to the selection
set, no matter how many objects you pick. (You can change this behavior to make
AutoCAD work like other Windows programs by turning on the Use Shift to Add to Selec-
tion option on the Option dialog box's Selection tab, but I suggest that you don't change
it.) Most editing commands affect the entire group of selected objects.
Use the SELECTSIMILAR command to automatically select similar objects
based on their properties. Select an object, right-click, and choose Select Similar
from the shortcut menu, and AutoCAD selects
all
similar objects. You can filter the
properties used for selection by typing
SELECTSIMILAR
at the command prompt,
then entering
SE
to display the Select Similar Settings dialog box (see Figure 10-2).
