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Quick Hatch Legend

With hatches you can characterise areas in your drawing. If you have a drawing with a lot of different hatches you might want to add a legend to your drawing. With 'Quick Hatch Legend' you can add a legend with just one click. It's not only an easy way to add a legend, it's also a good way to quantify your drawing. By default the command will take the sum of the areas of similar hatches and will add that to the legend. Legends are added to guide the reader through a drawing. That means that any graphic difference potentially should get it's own entry in the legend. That's why the command will consider several properties of the hatch to determine if it's similar to other hatches in your drawing. If an hatch pattern of a hatch isn't solid that means the angle could also be relevant. You can decide if the command should consider the angle. Besides the area you can also add the quantity, the number of times the hatch is found in the model space, to the legend. If you need to work with those values you can choose to export the numbers to Excel. The layer name will be used for the legend entry. You can strip that name however. For instance, if a hatch is on layer '012-grass-h' you may not want to show '012-' at the start of the name and '-h' at the end of the name. In that case you can let the command remove the first four characters and the last two characters of the layer name. In that case the command will add 'grass' as legend entry.

Command summery

Entry:
QHL
Applies to:
hatches
Effect:
Create a legend based on the hatches in the model space
Tags:
calculate, legend, pick, properties
Categories:
Calculators, excel, extractors, urban legends
Suitability:
No additional suitability information
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Pointers

Development Log

November 2014
- The command now also considers hatches with a background color or gradients in your drawings.

September 2014
- You can now make a selection manually instead of an automatic selection of all the hatches in model space.
- Instead of sorting the layers by layername you can choose to sort by quantity or area.
- The command doesn't stop if a textstyle has a fixed textheight anymore so you can use any textstyle you want.

Known issues

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