Interesting response to the Background Mask Tools

What turned out to be a weekend project originally turned out to be something more. It seems that there are quite a few people that are using the new Background Mask feature with AutoCAD 2005 or they are sure interested in start. There has been a larger demand for a set of tools that I had thought in this area. Now for those that have tried the tools and found them to help with using the Background Mask feature I am working on what will be the next Beta release. Like I had mentioned earlier I didn't plan on the amount of people looking for such a tool so I figure I should make some changes so it looks more like a standard AutoCAD command.

Beta 2 will have the following changes:

-DimStyleMask
  * The prompts will be flipped asking for a Dimension Style first and then a color. It made no sense to ask for a color if you don't have a valid Dimension Name.
  * The color prompt will retain the last used color or selection. Pressing the Enter key will accept the previous value. This may change to the current Fill Color for the Dimension Style, but I am not sure yet.

-DimMask & DimMask
  * The prompts will be flipped asking for a Selection first and then a color. It made no sense to ask for a color if you don't have a valid Dimension Name. The commands will also support PickFirst which they do today, but it seems a little awkward.
  * The color prompt will retain the last used color or selection. Pressing the Enter key will accept the previous value.

-MtextMask & MtextMask
  * The prompts will be flipped asking for a Selection first and then a color. It made no sense to ask for a color if you don't have a valid Dimension Name. The commands will also support PickFirst which they do today, but it seems a little awkward.
  * The color prompt will retain the last used color or selection. Pressing the Enter key will accept the previous value.
  * Support will be added for Border Offset/Background Scale Factor. A prompt will be available for you to specify Offset or Color versus the current Color prompt. If you select Color then you will get the choices that are in the command today.

I am hoping that Beta2 will be ready by ends week.

If you have any comments on the commands please feel free to share by adding comments here or e-mail them to me.

Sincerely,
  Lee

Comments

[Barry Vanderent]

Thanks for background mask tools!

I am the new CAD manager for a mid-size civil engineering firm that has just upgraded to 2005. Their CAD work uses a lot of legacy or old school CAD techniques and lisp routines. One of them being the use of 3dfaces to mask text through an old custom Lisp routine. As you know 3D faces can have far reaching implications when plotting (polylines, arrowheads, fills etc).
So when I saw the 2005 text mask I thought finally I can show my users (what should be) the best practice. Well the main problem we had was you cannot setup a default border size! Ugh! And some users felt it was clumsy to use the properties box to add a mask to Mutliple Mtext objects.

So let me just say again.. THANK YOU!