We certainly added many new abilities to the AutoCAD 2011 Hatch object including live preview, the new Hatch ribbon, transparency, hatch background color, and much much more. Here are ten great tips on AutoCAD 2011 for the new Hatch enhancements from my Autodesk colleagues Cliff Young and Nigma Liu who  are AutoCAD QA Engineers here at Autodesk.

1. Select a layer on which to create all hatches – If you want all your hatches to be created on a certain layer, set HPLAYER system variable to that layer name.
2. Automatically send all hatches in a drawing behind all other geometry – Command: HATCHTOBACK.
3. Dynamically update hatch properties, such as Angle, Scale and Origin by selecting a hatch and clicking the centroid grip at the hatch’s center.
4. Dynamically update hatch properties during hatch creation by changing the values on the Ribbon
5. If you feel it is slow to launch hatch command or the hatches flow over the boundaries, you can try to turn off the live preview by set system variable HPQUICKPREVIEW =off
6. There is no live preview if boundaries are partly out of the screen
7. If you want to see the hatch dialog instead of the hatch contextual tab in ribbon when launch hatch command you can set system variable  HPDLGMODE=1
8. Double clicking hatch will now bring up the properties palette instead of hatch dialog. If you want to bring up hatch dialog please change via cui\double click actions\hatch
9. You can control the hatch grip hot menu by setting system variable GRIPMULTIFUNCTIONAL
10. Increased threshold for “Do you really want to continue?”  when you pick a point to hatch if the objects in xref are more than 1000, it can be controlled by system variable HPOBJWARNING

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