Hatches and fills

A hatch (HATCH) fills a closed boundary with a pattern of lines, a solid fill or a gradient: sections, materials, areas of a plan. LinceCAD draws the hatches of any DWG or DXF with their pattern and islands, and creates new hatches with HATCH and gradients with GRADIENT.

Creating a hatch

Enter HATCH or click Hatch on the ribbon. The Hatch and Gradient dialog box opens.
Choose the Pattern, the Scale and the Angle.
Specify the boundary with Add: Pick points (click inside the area: LinceCAD finds the closed boundary around it and any islands inside) or with Add: Select objects (select the closed objects that form it). Both can be combined. If the boundary has small gaps, HPGAPTOL closes them.
Click OK.

Islands (boundaries inside the boundary) are treated as in AutoCAD's Normal style: hatched and empty areas alternate inwards.

Patterns

Pattern	Look
SOLID	Solid fill in the hatch color
ANSI31	45° hatching, the usual one for sections
ANSI32	Pairs of lines at 45° (steel)
ANSI37	Grid at 45°
LINE	Horizontal lines
NET	Horizontal and vertical grid
CROSS	Crosses
DOTS	Dots
BRICK	Brick
HONEY	Hexagonal honeycomb
HORMIGON	Concrete

They are LinceCAD's own definitions with the usual names, so AutoCAD recognizes the hatch. Hatches that come with a drawing are always drawn with the pattern they store, even if it is not in this list.

The scale multiplies the pattern spacing; the angle rotates it (with ANSI31, 0° gives the 45° hatching).

The Origin option of HATCH chooses the point the pattern passes through: for example, so that a row of bricks starts at the corner of the wall.

Editing a hatch

Double-click the hatch, or use HATCHEDIT, to change its pattern, scale, angle, gradient or origin. On the command line, HATCHEDIT also disassociates it from its boundary or associates it with other objects, separates it into independent hatches (one per area) and recreates its boundary as polylines. The PROPERTIES palette also changes the layer, the color and the other general properties. A hatch is moved, copied, rotated and scaled like any other object, and TRIM removes the piece you pick between the cutting edges.

Associative hatches

The hatches LinceCAD creates are associative, as in AutoCAD: they keep the objects of their boundary and, if one of them is edited (with grips, MOVE, STRETCH, PEDIT...), the hatch is rebuilt to follow it. It stops being associative if the hatch is moved on its own, if a boundary object is erased or if it is trimmed. AutoCAD recognizes the associativity when it opens the drawing.

HATCHGENERATEBOUNDARY creates polylines with the boundary of a hatch that has lost it (without associating them).

Gradients

GRADIENT, or the Gradient tab of the HATCH dialog box, fills with a gradient of one color (towards black or white) or of two, in the nine AutoCAD types (linear, cylinder, spherical, hemispherical, curved and their inverted versions), centered or shifted and at any angle. They are saved as in AutoCAD, and the gradients that come in drawings are shown with their colors.

Related commands

BOUNDARY creates a polyline or a region from the boundary around a point, with the same search as HATCH.
REGION converts closed curves into regions.
SOLID draws filled triangles and quadrilaterals, and DONUT, filled rings or circles.
WIPEOUT covers what lies under a boundary with the background color.
DRAWORDER decides whether the hatch is below or above other objects.

Notes

AutoCAD's Outer and Ignore island styles are drawn as Normal.
User-defined patterns (.pat files) are not available yet.
The hatch is not automatically sent behind its boundary: use DRAWORDER if needed.
When plotting, hatches come out with their pattern or fill, just as on screen.