Kent Cooper didn’t like the dot hatch patterns in AutoCAD, so he made his own and shared them with us.

“I was a little surprised to find that in AutoCAD’s/Architectural Desktop’s dots and general dots hatch patterns, although it appears that the ‘dots’ they draw (really zero-length lines) are in a triangular grid, they actually are not. Also, their dot spacing is very peculiar (0.0625 units, for some odd reason); therefore, if you want a particular dot spacing, you need to do some calculations to get the hatch scale you need to use. And although I encountered a reference on the AutoCAD Customization Discussion Group to what someone called ‘the standard sqdots pattern’ for a square grid, it’s not part of my AutoCAD, though it may have been added in a later version.

“I made patterns of dots at precisely one-drawing-unit spacing (so I can get the spacing I want directly by way of the hatch scale) in three arrangements: a square grid, an accurate 60° triangular grid, and, while I was at it, a hexagonal grid with a one-unit hexagon edge rather than across-the-hexagon ‘diameter.’

“I later discovered, while trying to determine whether that sqdots pattern was a later addition, that it exists in an IntelliCAD set of patterns, along with a tridots pattern, and those two turn out to be essentially identical to the definitions I had come up with for the square and triangular grids, except for a slightly different precision in the triangular one. They don’t include a hexagonal one, as far as I could tell. But I prefer things like hatch pattern names to start with the generic aspect and follow with the specific, so I called mine dots-sq, dots-tri, and dots-hex.

“I have attached them in a TXT file, rather than a PAT file, because if they go together into a PAT file, it should be into ACAD.pat rather than in their own file (I didn’t want to have people try to download a PAT file and think they’d be able to use them simply from that), or if they are loaded as custom patterns, each should go into a separate PAT file named with its pattern name.”

Notes from Cadalyst Tip Reviewer Brian Benton: AutoCAD is great because we can customize so many things with it. Hatch patterns are no exception. Hatch patterns can be difficult to customize, especially complex ones. The tipster has supplied us with the code needed. Copy it into the very end (or bottom) of the acad.pat file. Don’t change any of the text; just add it to the bottom. That way if there are any issues with the pattern, it will be easy for you to edit or remove it if you have to. Plus, this means you won’t be altering the preloaded AutoCAD hatch patterns; they will remain intact.