AutoCAD® 2010 For Dummies®

Chapter 15. Down the Hatch

In This Chapter

• Adding hatching to your drawings

• Copying existing hatches

• Using predefined and user-defined hatch patterns

• Making solid and gradient fills

• Using annotative hatching

• Choosing hatching boundaries

• Editing hatches

If you were hoping to hatch a plot (or plot a hatch), see Chapter 16 instead. If you want to hatch an egg, look for Raising Chickens For Dummies. If you need to fill in closed areas of your drawings with special patterns of lines or solid fills (known as hatching), this is your chapter.

Drafters often use hatching to represent the type of material that makes up an object, such as insulation, metal, concrete, and so on. In other cases, hatching helps emphasize or clarify the extent of a particular element in the drawing — for example, showing the location of walls in a building plan or highlighting a swampy area on a map so you know where to avoid building a road. Figure 15-1 shows an example of hatching in a structural detail.

As I mention in Chapter 13, hatching is another component of AutoCAD's annotative objects. Hatch patterns have a scale factor (as I explain in the "Getting it right: Hatch angle and scale" section, later in this chapter) and can be created so that the hatch scale updates as the annotation scale changes.

An AutoCAD hatch is a separate object that fills a space, has an appearance dictated by the hatch pattern assigned to it, and is associated with the objects that bound the space, such as lines, polylines, or arcs. If you ...