Tipster extraordinaire Leonid Nemirovsky shares a tip for working with polylines in AutoCAD.

“Select a polyline (can be multi-segment) so you can see its grips. Select the center grip; press the Ctrl key (that will break a pline segment in two without exploding the pline); press the Ctrl key again and it will convert the segment of pline into a pline arc. Press Ctrl once more and it will again be a straight segment.

“Try this same trick on a pline arc segment; the result may surprise you. The trick also works with hatching (see below)."

Notes from Cadalyst tip reviewer Brian Benton: More recent versions of AutoCAD have the ability to grip-edit polylines — I don’t mean just moving the vertexes around, either. This tip shows ways to create new vertexes in a polyline, stretch a segment, and more. Select a polyline; then select a midpoint grip to make it “hot.” Pressing the Ctrl key will toggle different options, allowing you to grip-edit the polyline by adding a new vertex, stretching the segment, or converting the line segment to an arc segment. If it’s an arc, AutoCAD will convert it to a line. You can do the same thing without making a grip hot: Select the polyline and hover over the grip.