AutoCAD Tip – Controlling drawing extents by clipping Paper Space Viewport.

By Dennis Collin

Recently, I was talking to users about how to control the extent of drawing elements within AutoCAD, specifically regarding the presentation of an irregular drawing area on a title sheet. One user suggested Wipeouts as a solution, whilst Wipeouts can be employed to mask undesired

Fig 1. The original unclipped paper space viewport

drawing information, they can sometimes have issues with element draw order and cause other display and printing problems.

A much better solution in this instance is to clip the viewport with a polyline entity. Simply draw a regular polyline in paper space 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.

Fig 2. Original viewport clipped to the red polyline boundary indicated.

The polyline and viewport can be placed on a non-printable layer if required ready for final output. Although some users use the Defpoints layer for this a better practice would be to create a Viewports Layer and set that layer to be non-printable, as per Fig 3.

Fig 3. Making the viewport layer non-printable.