Polyline Circles

[ger21]

Does anyone need to have circles drawn as segmented polylines? Someone on the Mach3 Yahoo group wanted a way to do it, so I wrote this quick macro to do it. It doesn't convert circles, it will draw them as polylines.

If you wish to make a toolbar button for it, enter the following for
the button macro:

^C^C-vbarun PLCircle.dvb!PLCircle.PLCircle

The macro itself must be located in a folder in the support file
search path for the button to work.

[JoelDirn]

You should be able to do the same thing with the command "donut".

Just give it the same inside & outside diameter.

- Joel -

[ger21]

Not exactly the same. The macro draws a "circle" made of of many short, straight segments. The donut command uses a polyline made up of 2 arc segments.

Thanks for the tip, though.

[gharpe]

you could use the polygon command with many sides. Is it a circle composed of straight line segments?

[ger21]

Another good tip. Thanks. So many ways to do things in AutoCAD, it's hard to think of them all.

[Uncle Buck]

why would you want it as polylines?

for machining, i find it more of a pain...

bigger file sizes too

[ger21]

I needed a quick way to draw a circle made up of multiple arcs, so modified the original macro here into this new one. Just tell it how many segments you want, and you'll get a circle composed of a single polyline containing that # of arc segments.

[ImanCarrot]

Handy that!

Incidentaly, you can make a text file of X and Z values, rename it with an SCR extension and type SCRIPT in AutoCAD and it'll import all the X and Z values straight into your drawing. You need to have PLINE as the first line in the file though.

I found this dead handy for importing exactly what you are doing, except my little lines were for elipses and aspheres. I had to EXPLODE the Polyline to make all the little lines.

So the SCR file format would be:

PLINE
15.0000,02.881022
15.0010,02.881022
etc