DraftSight: Status-Bar Star Pt. 1

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Now that I’ve been drawing on DraftSight for a while, I realized that I’m always searching the ribbon for new and helpful features, but sometimes forget about the benefits of the Status Bar. The Status Bar is located in the lower right corner of the DraftSight application and contains multiple icons that control and guide your cursor while designing.

Today’s post will be focusing on the Snap Grid, Snap, Ortho, and Polar icons. When activated, each option functions differently, and heavily influences your drafting experience.

Starting with Snap Grid, this feature displays a point graph demonstrating your current coordinate system. If you right click on the icon, you can turn the Grid on and off, along with accessing it’s drafting options by selecting Settings.

In Settings, you’ll have the ability to change the spacing of your grid points, along with the orientation. If you change your orientation to Isometric, you’ll be able to create 2D drawings that represent 3D objects.

The Snap icon does exactly what its name suggests – it snaps your cursor to points on your invisible (or visible) coordinate grid in your display window. In this sense, using Snap speeds up your drawing process by making your cursor do the positioning and aligning for you.

You can even make your cursor attract to angles, by checking the Radial option in Snap Settings and entering your preferred angle.

Next up is Ortho, which makes it so that you can only draw horizontally or vertically. This feature is especially convenient when drawing rectangular shapes or wanting to create perfectly straight lines in your drawing window.

Lastly, selecting Polar will enable guidelines to appear extending from your cursor at certain angles. If you right click on the icon and access its Settings, you can control which angles activate the visible guidelines.

I hope this post encourages you to take advantage of the Status Bar while drafting!

Check out the video below to see the Status Bar in action and look out for next blog covering more of its features!

(0:00 Grid Snap, 0:08 Snap, 0:20 Ortho, 0:31 Polar)

 

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