Took me 3 years to realize I was mirroring my viewport instead of rotating it

Had a senior drafter lean over my shoulder last Tuesday and just quietly say 'you know that's gonna plot backwards, right?' and that's when I understood why my last 3 revisions had to be redrawn from scratch - has anyone else had a basic command click way later than it should have?

2 comments

2 Comments

walker.hayden26d ago

Hold up though, is it really that big of a deal? I mean yeah it sucks to redo work but it sounds like you caught it after only three revisions. I've seen guys straight up send mirrored prints to a client and nobody noticed until installation. The plotter doesn't care which way the viewport is facing, it just prints what's there. Unless you're working on something super precise like a foundation plan, most people aren't gonna catch a mirrored detail unless it's got text in it.

haydenj9026d ago

Three years ago I read a blog post from an old AutoCAD guy who swore he'd been drafting for 15 years before he realized his dimension text was set to the wrong style the whole time. Made me feel a lot better about my own screwups. But honestly @walker.hayden you're right about the mirror thing not always being a disaster, though I've seen it bite people hard on structural plans where a column line ends up on the wrong side. The real kicker is when you've got text in a mirrored viewport and suddenly everything reads backwards like a bathroom mirror. I figure most of us have at least one command that took way too long to figure out, like the day I learned you can just type 'LA' instead of clicking through four menus.