AutoCAD Tip – Controlling drawing extents with AutoCAD’s viewport clipping function

By Dennis Collin

On a recent training course, I was talking to users about the control of drawing elements within AutoCAD, specifically regarding the control of an irregular drawing area on a title sheet. One user proposed Wipeouts as an answer. Whilst Wipeouts can be employed to mask undesired drawing information, they can sometimes have issues with element draw order and other display and printing problems.

A much better solution than Wipeout objects in this instance is to clip the viewport with a polyline entity. Simply draw a regular polyline around the viewport, access the Clip viewport command from the ribbon or type VPCLIP from the command prompt. Select the viewport and then choose the clipping polyline to achieve a result like the image below.

The polyline and viewport can be placed on a non-printable layer if required ready for final output.