Harry's tips from February include some really nice tricks and great examples. This month, Harry tried something different. He uploaded the tips to Cadalyst's CAD Tips site (www.cadalyst.com/cadtips) as usual, but kept quiet -- then watched to see which tips were downloaded the most. That honor goes to Ronald Maneja - a regular contributor to Hot Tip Harry. To make up for Harry's tardiness, here is a list of tips for you to consider and comment on.

Dynamic grid drawing - Ron Perez - Grid drawing utility. Enter the number of rows and columns then locate the upper left corner. Drag the grid into position. When finished each bar of the grid can be manipulated individually. A nicely programmed example that is also useful.

Dimension polylines - Ronald Maneja - Automatic polyline dimensioning. Select the drawing scale (program forces 20, 30, or 50 - can be adjusted) and then pick a polyline. All the segment sizes are then automatically dimensioned.

Ellipse drawing tools - Rick Muncy - A variety of ellipse drawing commands for creating ellipses using rectangle location points. See the source code for the list of command options.

Copy, rotate, and scale - Robert Gardner - Copy, rotate, and scale utility based on selection of two points (from and to), and two angles (from and to), and a scale factor. Nice example showing the use of variables entered in LISP inside AutoCAD command sequences.

Draw a square or rectangle - Theodorus Winata - Draw a square or rectangle entering the lengths of each side and the rotation angle. Simplifies input from points to just entering the leg sizes.

Drawing data dump - Leonid Nemirovsky - Displays an alert box with select information about the current drawing system variable values. A quick way to find out the state of the drawing editor that can be further customized to meet your specific needs.

Semi circle drawing - Sanjay Kulkarni - Draw semi circles given two input points. Option to flip the semi circle when finished with two point entry.

Text numbers to polylines - Ronald Maneja - TOP TIP - Given two sets of text objects (as in a table of coordinates) containing numeric information, this utility will draw a polyline. The first selection set of text objects requested is for the Y axis, the second for the X axis. The two are combined to create a list of points that are then turned into a polyline. Nice, useful tip, Ronald - worthy of the top tip selection!