EagleRock Products

ESnap

ESnap stands for Entity Snap. According to DraftSight’s help file, it snaps to “geometrically significant points on drawing entities, for example, end points, intersections, and center points.” By “snapping to a significant point”, ESnap “provides an exact position for drawing and editing commands.”

Upon enabling ESnap, you will notice that a white box is displayed around the crosshairs. This box is called the gravity box. DraftSight targets possible ESnaps inside the gravity box. “Gravity” refers to the way that the cursor is “pulled” into the ESnap.

To change the size of the gravity box, enter the gravity command into the command window and then enter a new value. The gravity box pictured above is a size 18. If the gravity box is too large, it will detect multiple ESnaps and may not use the desired one; if it is too small, it will become difficult to use.

When ESnap acquires an entity, a small marker will appear over it. If you hover over the ESnap, a tooltip will appear with the name of the ESnap.

In this case, the tooltip is indicating that an end point was found, and it is displaying the end point marker (a square) over the endpoint. Once an ESnap has been acquired, you can click and ESnap will pull your cursor in, specifying the exact location even though the cursor is not exactly over it.

Individual ESnaps can be enabled and disabled by right clicking on the ESnap button and selecting Settings:

Enabling many ESnaps at once is not always helpful. For example, the nearest ESnap conflicts with the parallel ESnap, making it impossible to detect a parallel snap.

ESnaps can also be individually temporarily enabled by right clicking in the drawing area ⇢ ESnap Overrides ⇢ select the desired ESnap. This is particularly helpful if ESnaps are conflicting with each other. In the above case, you could right click in the drawing area ⇢ ESnap Overrides ⇢ Parallel. This will turn the parallel ESnap on and all others off while you specify the next point.

You can also temporarily enable an ESnap by entering its alias into the command window. ESnap commands are transparent commands meaning that they can be entered while another command is being executed.

For example, if we wanted to draw a line in the center of a circle, we would first start the line and then when prompted to specify a start point, we would enter cen, the alias for the circle ESnap.

: line
Options: Segments, Enter to continue from last point or
Specify start point>> cen
of <select entity to snap to center of>

The prompt then changes to “of”, referring to the center “of” a circle. The circle ESnap is now enabled exclusively. By hovering over the edge of a circle, the circle marker will appear in the center allowing us to click and snap to it.