Product News

More XtraTools™ Commands More power features to help you solve tedious tasks – Now also on Mac and Linux Take a look at the XtraTools menu or ribbon tab and you will discover many new features to manage layouts viewports, import/export dimension styles, create nice text labels, scale blocks, define draw order by color, and more. ARES Commander significantly increases the number of tools in the XtraTools tab. The same features are now also available for Mac and Linux. For your reference, this was the XtraTools tab in the previous version of ARES Commander. The number of tools is significantly higher if you compare with the new XtraTools tab. Using the command “Viewport Scale Ratio“ Let’s have a look, when we set up a sheet in PAPER SPACE and create the viewports, we might forget the scale of that view. With XtraTools and the command “Viewport Scale Ratio“, ARES Commander will

Dynamic Print Preview The Print settings dialog has been redesigned to improve productivity Enjoy a reorganized dialog for Print settings with a dynamic preview representing your drawing as it would be printed. You no longer need to switch between settings and preview to adjust your print configuration. ARES Commander has a new print dialog box. It has been redesigned to have a preview – in real time – of what we are going to print. Here, we see how it will be printed. In this dialog we find all the necessary parameters to configure our printing correctly. Options with Dynamic Print Preview We can choose the printer, the number of copies, and even the paper size, and of course, we can rotate it. We can also configure the scale among other parameters. Any changes that we make in this box, we can apply directly to our tab in paper space.

Advanced Block Attributes Editing New dialog for advanced editing of block attributes and properties Select one or more block insertions and use this new dialog to edit one or more attributes but also block properties such as a layer, line style, color, text style and more. ARES Commander offers a new dialog that allows to quickly change the attributes of a block. Not only the information that contains the attribute but also some of its properties. In this example (Video), we will modify the name and after pressing APPLY we see the change. Block with attributes properties We can also vary the height of the text, its color, and any other properties we see here. In this example, there are some labels that we will modify. Because it is a block with attributes, you can insert it again or copy an existing one. The new dialog of ARES Commander makes it

Split Dimension Lines Split Dimension lines and extension lines to avoid any overlap Improve the readability of your annotations, when a dimension line or an extension line is overlapping another entity the command, SPLITDIMENSION will help you split them with a default or manual distance without breaking the associativity. ARES Commander offers us a new tool called SPLIT DIMENSION. It allows us to solve the meetings and crossings of lines and extensions for dimensions and leaders. Working with Split Dimension Let’s see how it works. In the ANNOTATE tab find the SPLIT DIMENSION command. Select the dimension and press ENTER. As we can see, ARES commander automatically resolves the crossings to prevent the dimension lines from passing over the drawing. Let’s try this example. Select the command SPLIT DIMENSION, select the arrow of the leader and press ENTER. As you can see, it appears clearly separated. By pressing ENTER we accepted

Pattern Along Any Path Copy entities along a path defined by another entity Array multiple copies of a chosen entity along a line, polyline, arc, circle, ellipse or spline. Different options let you define the distance and a total number of insertions but also how to align each insertion with the chosen path. ARES Commander now lets you copy entities along a path. Here (watch video), we have a rectangle and an arc. Using the PATTERN command, we can now choose the new function “PATH”, where we select the entity and the path. Press OK. We can see how the rectangle has been copied along with the arc. We can control how the elements will be copied along with the path. How to copy elements along any path For example, we can divide the path for a given amount of entities. As an example, I make 15 copies We can also determine

Insert Center Lines Insert Centerlines between pairs of lines, concentric arc and polyline segments Very popular for Mechanical design but also very helpful in other situations, the CENTERLINE command will draw a line at equidistance of the pair of entities you selected. The CENTER line style will be assigned by default and you can fine tune the extension of the Centerline. ARES Commander gives us the ability to quickly create a center line. We can choose 2 lines and ARES Commander draws a line that passes through its center. After selecting them we can know the properties of these lines, and determine a specific value of distance that will extend beyond the reference entities. Working with CENTERLINES In this case, we are going to relocate the center lines to match the sides of these tubes. Then we activate the possibility to set to a custom distance, choosing “YES” and typing a

Advanced PDF to DWG conversion New features allow us to recover more information from the PDF Besides converting or batch-processing your PDF files into DWG files, ARES Commander offers now the option to recover the layers organization and names but also to maintain the LineStyle and LineWeight of entities. Recovering layers from a PDF file PDF is a very popular file format to share drawings. However, PDF cannot be modified. In ARES Commander you can use PDF Import to convert the PDF file to DWG entities. Now you can go even further and recover the layer structure from the PDF file. We can import the PDF and make all the entities that appear in the drawing grouped by color or group them according to the original layers. Grouping entities in a drawing Let’s see how it works, from the INSERT tab, choose PDF IMPORT. Select the desired file, choose one or

Trim and PowerTrim in Hatches and Gradients Unrivaled flexibility to edit the shape of your hatches and gradients You can now trim hatches and gradients with the TRIM and POWERTRIM commands. It’s never been easier to edit the shape of the areas containing hatches and gradients. Divided hatches and gradients maintain associativity and remain as one entity. ARES Commander offers the possibility to use TRIM with a hatch. For that, we only need a line, a polyline, an arc, etc., which serve as a cutting edge. Then select the TRIM command. Learning how to TRIM In this case, select the line, and after pressing OK select the side of the Hatch that we want to cut. Now, the POWERTRIM command also allows trimming the HATCH entities. To do this, select the command and press the pointer. By moving the pointer around the screen, ARES Commander will cut all the items

Relative Coordinates in Angles Use the “@” prefix to enter the angle from the last given segment You can now use the “@” prefix to enter relative angles just like you are already used to for relative distances. This unique ability simplifies significantly the coordinate input when you draw successive lines or polyline segments. ARES Commander is introducing in this version a small but innovative feature that can interestingly improve coordinates input. It is the possibility of adding polar coordinates with relative angles. Using the ”@” Command Let’s see how it works, In the video above, we are going to draw a pentagon with 5 equal sides of 5 meters and angles of 72 degrees. Obviously, we could have used the POLYGON command for that purpose but we just want to make a conceptual example to explain the new feature. Defining polar coordinates We start with a line and define