AutoCAD® 2012 FOR DUMMIES®

Slicing, Dicing, and Splicing

The commands in this section — TRIM, EXTEND, BREAK, FILLET, CHAMFER, and JOIN — are useful for shortening and lengthening objects, for breaking them in two, and for putting them back together again.

Trim and Extend

TRIM and EXTEND are the twin commands for making lines, polylines, and arcs shorter and longer. They're the yin and yang, the Laurel and Hardy, the Jack Sprat and his wife of the AutoCAD editing world. The two commands and their prompts are almost identical, so the following steps cover both. I show the prompts for the TRIM command; the EXTEND prompts are similar:

1. Click the Trim or Extend button on the Home tab's Modify panel.

   AutoCAD prompts you to select cutting edges that will do the trimming (or, if you choose the EXTEND command, boundary edges for extending to):

   Current settings: Projection=UCS, Edge=None
   Select cutting edges …
   Select objects or <select all>:

2. Press Enter to accept the default option to select all drawing objects, or select individual objects by picking them. Press Enter to end object selection.

   The objects you select in this step become the cutting edge of the TRIM command or the boundary to which objects will be extended by the EXTEND command.

   Figure 11-7 shows a cutting edge (for TRIM) and a boundary edge (for EXTEND). ...