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Snap Modes
by Lynne Taylor - 09 May 2002

Wasn’t it frustrating that not all of the snap modes were available with the Place SmartLine tool in MicroStation/J? For example, to place a line tangential to a circle or arc, you had to use the Place Line tool. A nice little enhancement of v8 is that the SmartLine’s capability has been extended to allow the use of Perpendicular and Tangent snaps and their fixed-point counterparts.

When you select the Place SmartLine tool, it is now possible to select the Perpendicular and Tangent snap modes from the button bar, or alternatively you can select Perpendicular, Perpendicular Point, Tangent or Tangent Point from the snaps pop-up menus. This functionality extends even further when using Place SmartLine with AccuSnap.

The “Fixed Point for Perp./Tan. From” setting in the General tab of the AccuSnap settings dialogue box offers the fixed-point option when using the Tangent or Perpendicular Snap mode with AccuSnap.

If we consider this in the context of Tangent snap, when “Fixed Point for Perp./Tan. From” is on, and the snap mode override is set to Tangent, AccuSnap fixes the start point of the line at the closest Tangent point of the circle.

If off with the snap mode override set to Tangent, AccuSnap allows you to draw a line tangential off of the circle, the final position of which is determined by the second data point.