Expert: Paul Jordan - 5/28/2009

Question
QUESTION: I do a lot of drawing of survey boundary lines. I enter dist < deg min sec. Often the same distance & bearing are repeated several times.
I used to be able to hit the up arrow key to retrieve the previous entry. But it doesn't work anymore. I think it was called doskey. Can you help me?

ANSWER: Hey Bill,

I remember Doskey and from what Wikipedia says, it's still available.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOSKey

With Autocad, the dynamic input feature (Where when you start entering numbers it appears right next to your cursor) might be keeping it from working.  You might try disabling that in your Options.

If that doesn't work, let me know and we'll dig in a little deeper.

Paul

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Paul
Thanks for your reply.
I do not use DYN input.
I input like this: @100<n45d30'30"e
It works great and is simple and accurate.
When I push my up arrow I get a set of coordinates which are the coordinates of the poit I am just made. If I push 2x the arrow key I get the previous Coord.
I don't think Doskey is enabled. How can I enable it?
billmay

Answer
Bill,

From what I can tell the old doskey command is in XP.  I went to the command prompt and it works fine there.  Now, getting it to work inside of Autocad, that's a different story.  I haven't been able to get anything to work on it.  I did find a slight work around where you'd keep your autocad text window open on a second screen or flip back and forth to it and you can cut and paste the text from there to the command line.  It's a bit cumbersome but, it sure beats typing it in again.

I use a Nostromo N52 Gamepad that allows me to program a ton of different key combinations and it's for my left hand.  When I find myself having to enter repetitive text, I'll just assign it to one of the keys but, I think you're working in a different ballpark on this one.

You might try posting the question on discussion.autodesk.com and see if anyone there has an answer.  

Sorry I couldn't be of any more help.  

Paul