A 701Kb PDF of this article as it appeared in the magazine—complete with images—is available by clicking HERE
TPC Desktop 2008 is all about making it easier to work with your survey data and drawings. It’s about doing less work and getting more done. Their new Global Background Clearing is a good example.
We put a lot of information on drawings. Take a typical ALTA or site survey– they can be loaded with information. With raster images, hatching, color gradients, contours, dimensions and all the rest, a drawing can get pretty cluttered pretty fast.
You would like to clean up the drawing, making it easier to read and work with, but too often in CAD programs, that means jumping through hoops to add objects behind objects just to clear the background, or it means creating extra layers for trimmed lines and other time consuming tricks. To say that background clearing in CAD is a hassle is an understatement.
That’s where Global Background Clearing and TPC Desktop 2008 come in. You tell TPC Desktop 2008 what types of objects you want to globally clear and it just takes care of it. Clear all the survey space text or point symbols. How about clearing around all those leaders so they don’t get confused with the lines they cross?
Of course you can tell individual objects to clear their own backgrounds in TPC Desktop 2008, and sometimes this flexibility is important. But most of the time, you just want to press the button and make it happen. That’s the beauty of Global Background Clearing.
One more tool makes Global Background Clearing a breezeDrawing Order. If you’ve used a desktop publishing program, you’re already familiar with using Drawing Order to determine what gets drawn when. If you want the background clearing for point symbols to take precedence over the background clearing for any survey text, just right click any point symbol and bring its layer forward.
When you export this drawing from TPC Desktop 2008 as a PDF, PNG, GIF, TIF or any of the other supported file formats, the cleared backgrounds track right through just like you would expect. So producing drawings with cleared backgrounds is easy, too.
Easy is good. And with Global Background Clearing and a couple of clicks, TPC Desktop 2008 can easily make even your most complicated drawings look better.
A 701Kb PDF of this article as it appeared in the magazine—complete with images—is available by clicking HERE