AccuSnap — I love it; I hate it; I love it!

By Rick DeWitt, Axiom’s Senior Technology Officer
AccuSnap is a new feature available in MicroStation V8. It is turned on by default when MicroStation V8 is installed. AccuSnap automatically moves or snaps the cursor to the keypoints of elements whenever the cursor comes within a certain range of a keypoint without having to actually initiate a tentative point. A little “x” visually snaps to the point and shows the active snap icon.

If that’s the point you want, just data point to commit it for the active command. AccuSnap is very useful and can speed up design time significantly. That’s when you’ll love it.

The AccuSnap indicator marking an element’s keypoint

The other side of the coin is when you’re in a fairly congested design area and need to place a data point somewhere other than on a keypoint. With AccuSnap on, the cursor is flopping all around between keypoints, preventing you from accessing the exact point that you are trying to reach. “Aaaargh. I hate it!” Well, don’t despair.

You can turn off AccuSnap a number of different ways. There is a new icon on the Snaps button bar that toggles AccuSnap on and off. It’s the icon with the yellow “X” on it.

The “X” icon turns AccuSnap on and off.

Here is yet another way to turn off AccuSnap. If you have AccuDraw active with the focus on the AccuDraw dialog box, then you can use the “j” AccuDraw shortcut key to toggle AccuSnap on and off.

With the focus on the AccuDraw dialog box, use the “j” key to toggle AccuSnap on and off.

Still another way is to click on the Snaps icon in the status bar. If you select this icon, the “AccuSnap Settings” dialog box opens. You can turn off AccuSnap by unchecking the “Enable AccuSnap” checkbox in the “General” tab.

Turn off AccuSnap by unchecking the “Enable AccuSnap” in the “AccuSnap Settings” dialog box.

And the last and possibly the best way if you run into this situation a lot is to assign the “accusnap toggle” key-in to a function key. Then all you have to do is hit a single function key at any point in the design process and AccuSnap is toggled on or off. We’ll cover how to do this in a future MicroStation Today issue. “Ahhhhh. I love it!”

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