AutoCAD Tip – Controlling linetype patterns on polyline entities

By Dennis Collin

I recently had a question about controlling the pattern of a dashed line within a drawing. The element was a polyline entity on a dashed line layer. However, the problem was wherever there was a short segment of line, it appeared as solid whereas the user desired a consistent display of dash lines throughout the object.

The reason the line segments appear as solid is that the dash pattern array resets every time it encounters a polyline vertex, for short line segments this can result in solid looking lines. This problem is easy to address, by using the Edit Polyline command (PEDIT). Execute the command, select the problem entities and set the LTGEN function to on. This should readjust the way the dash line pattern is applied as per the image below.