AutoCAD: Fading Of Locked Layers

It is easy to control the fading of the locked layers if you know the right system variables.There are two system variables that will let us control the fading intensity of locked layers.
LAYLOCKFADECTL directly controls the intensity of the fading of locked layers. The higher the value we enter the more the layers will fade to show that they are locked.
XFADECTL controls the fading when we enter the REFEDIT mode. Everything that is not being edited will fade according to the intensity we set on this system variable.
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AutoCAD: MAXSORT or How many objects to be listed

Show those missing layers in the layer Manager.Did you ever encounter that the "Layer Properties" toolbar doesn´t show all the layers you think it should? First thing you should do is to check if there is any filter applied to the layers. To do that go to Layer Manager (LA) and check on the left upper corner if any of the filters is applied.

If that desn't solve your issue, your problem might come from the MAXSORT system variable. This variable controls the maximum number of items to be shown in any list in AutoCAD, for example, in the layer list of the Layer Properties toolbar. Your problem might be that you have (together between your drawing and the XRefs) more than 1000 layers. The default MAXSORT value (in AutoCAD architecture 2009) is 1000, so having more than 1000 layers will turn into some layers not being shown.

The only thing you need to do is set MAXSORT System Variable to a higher number and you will be able to see all your layers listed in your Layer Properties Toolbar.

I am not sure if increasing this value will affect in any way the performance of the program, so please don't hesitate to leave a comment about it if you know something about this issue.

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AutoCAD: Disabling selection preview for Hatches

Do you get stuck in the selection preview of complex objects?A nice feature like the selection preview can become really annoying if we are working with dense hatch patterns.
What selection preview does is that it highlights the object we are going to select if we click the left mouse button. This works very nice and smooth with simple objects like lines, polylines, arcs, etc. It happens though that when we have a dense hatch, specially if it is a hatch made of dots it might take several seconds to show the selection preview due to the amount of objects in the hatch pattern.
Although we can turn off the selection preview turning the SELECTIONPREVIEW system variable to 0, what we actually want to do is to keep it on for some elements and off for some others like hatch patterns.
We have two options to do that.

1. Set the system variable PREVIEWFILTER to 16, this will only exclude hatch patterns from the selection previews.
2. Go to Format --> Options --> Selection Tab -->Visual Effects Options --> Advanced Options --> Uncheck the Box in front of Hatch Patterns.
   

See it in a couple of images for more detailed reference.









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AutoCAD System Variable: VISRETAIN

Control if you want your XREFs to retain the visual changes or not.
Català - Castellano
Sometimes we change colors of the layers of an XREF for different reasons. Eventually we might want to get the layers to they original state. If we inserted the XRef on 0,0,0 coordinates and didn´t move it, scale it or clip it, we can just detach it and attach it again.
But in many circumstances we might have moved, clipped or scaled the xref, so we don't want to do that again. If we want to get the layers to they original color, we can use the command VISRETAIN. This system variable controls whether the changes made to XREFs are retained or are only temporal. If the variable is set to 1, the changes are kept, if we set it to 0, reloading the XREF will bring back the original colors.
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