Back Ground Mask Toggle

Have you ever wanted to turn on or off back ground masks on a gaggle of mText objects? If you have then you’ll want to check out the SincPac and it’s BG Mask Toggle Tool. It allows you to either turn on or off the Back Ground Mask or turn it on. Here is a short video showing it in action.

Editing Alignments

Sometimes we want alignments to always to be tangent. Often times when moving alignments we want to temporarily turn off tangency so we can move the alignment were it needs to go.

To do this go into the Alignment Layout Tools, grid view.

Then change the Tangency Constraint column to something Fixed. Then you will be able to move segments without it trying to keep the tangency. Once done go back in and change the Tangency Constraint to Floating or Free to get tangency back.

Digitize Section: DigitizeSectionTo3DPoly

Have you ever gotten drawings or PDFs from people, but without the data that made up the sections? If so then this post is for you. The scenario that I’d use this tool in the past would be if I was a contractor and received some PDFs of the sections. I’d then go through and digitize the sections, scale them and then transfer them to plan view. I’d then use the 3D polylines to create a surface I could use to do quantities. In order to facilitate the process quicker I wrote the DigitizeSectionTo3DPoly to do the steps without me having to think too much. The command may be found in the SincPac and the help file may be found here.

I also created a video showing it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzwAkIQpO10