Dear Mr. Toker,

The issue of VIEWRES is one of my my pet peeves. This relic of a command was necessary in the slow early days of computing… I remember these days well, as I started wuth AutoCAD 1.2. However, these days of much higher speed computers, and 128MB or 256MB video cards (or more), VIEWRES is quite useless a concept anymore. Take a large, dense, complicated site plan with tons of contours and curviture… set VIEWRES to 100 and do a time benchmark on a regen, then crank it all the way up to 20000 and time the regen, virtually no difference, if detectable at all.

AutoCAD, for the longest time, automatically defaulted to a low VIEWRES of 100 (way to low for most site and architectural work), then starting I believe with AutoCAD 2004 made the default value 1000, better but oftentimes still too low. Sadly, it’s also quirky being one of the few “system variables” that cannot be set using a (setvar [function]) in Autolisp upon drawing start-up, and requires the clunky execution of the command and stumble through a useless prompt.

Then, the most amazing part is, that Autodesk refused to update this command, to remove the non-functional “Do you want fast zooms” prompt, which AutoCAD help will tell you doesn’t do anything anymore, regardless of how you answer, they only keep that part in there for legacy scripts!!!!! This prompt hasn’t been useful for more than a decade, yet they keep this “unsuppressible” prompt in there for the chance that someone might have a 1K script file, which anyone can edit in a few seconds if the command behavior did change. They’ve changed the behavior and prompt sequence on hundreds of commands through the various releases, why do they have onto this useless relic is beyond me? The reasons are unfathonable to me.

Did you know, by the way, that a low VIEWRES setting can also suppress the appearance of a linetype… yes, it’s true. In supporting about 200 CAD users at my company, I’ve seen cases where the “match line” that had a “border” linetype, or other linetypes used, failed to display the linetype pattern because VIEWRES was set to 100. Cranking VIEWRES up resolved the linetype display problem.

Autodesk should make VIEWRES a standard SYSVAR, addressible directly from lisp, without the irrelevant fast zoom prompt, and default to a high setting. The usefulness of VIEWRES expired more than a decade ago, or more.

Mark,

You are correct-amundo about Viewres. Drives you crazy, doesn’t it? I set mine for 20,000 and leave it.

Next on the pet peeve list: AutoCAD’s retar er, mentally challenged List command. For example, if a line’s color is bylayer, why doesn’t List tell you the color anyway? No, you have to play Sherlock Holmes and go to the Layer dialog and look up the layer. I certainly can’t tell the difference between colors 2 and 50. Same for linetypes. Also, when I list a polyline, I usually don’t care to step through all the vertices. I want layer, color, linetype, length and perhaps number of vertices.

I’ve written a fast command line lister, that also works with buried xref objects. The regular List returns “Xref….” Yes, but what if I want something within it? The nested lister in Express Tools exists, but it’s pretty skimpy.

Email me; I’ll give you the LISP lister if you want. Until then, happy CADing.

Skyler Mills
smills maguiregroup.com

Dear Mr Toker,

Do you know any free dwg viewer programs that support VIEWRES ? I need to show dwg files without autocad but I can’t find any viewer that supports viewres.

/Ruben

 What about solids? Is there any way to improve the display resolution of a solid object that has been modified using sy the Boolean  Subtract command?

Mr. Toker
 Thank you so much for the info. The REVOLVE command is the best way to get the results I wanted!

Is there another setting that goes with viewres? as i zoom into a drawing, all my angled lines become distorted and start showing at an extreme angle.