Do excuse my slight absence from making any new and substantial posts here over the past couple 
weeks. Just last week the May/June 2007 AUGI World magazine was shipped. Just as the May/June issue was shipped the submission deadline for the July/August AUGI World came up. As you may have guessed I will have another article in that issue, talking about Thematic Mapping in Map 3D. No less with everything behind me now you can expect more frequent posts once again.
To kick things back into gear I’ll offer up a quick tip on making circular viewports. This one came up just the other day, and so I figured I’d share the quick tip with you. Anyone using layout tabs has likely become an expert at creating rectangular viewports. Whip out the MVIEW command, or just click the 
(single viewport) toolbar button, and within a few clicks you have a rectangular viewport. But what if you want to do a circular viewport? It’s a common request for those wanting to “zoom” in on an area within a plan. Luckily, if you’re familiar with creating normal rectangular viewports than circular viewports will be a cinch.
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Using the standard AutoCAD CIRCLE command, draw a circle to represent the viewport boundary in your desired layout tab (Left circle in illustration).
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Using the MVIEW command, type OB for object and select the circle you drew in step 1 above. You can also use the “Convert Object to Viewport” button on the “Viewports” toolbar (illustrated below). Upon clicking the circle, AutoCAD will create a viewport which you can configure the same as any other viewport in AutoCAD (Right circle in illustration above)
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Again, not necessarily a revolutionary tip, but definitely one that gets overlooked quite frequently. With my AUGI World deadline behind me, stay tuned as I will work to get The CAD Geek blog caught up once again.
