Hatching in AutoCAD 2013

by John Flanagan

A hatch is a pattern of lines and dots that fills an enclosed area.

Create user-defined hatch patterns

When you choose a hatch pattern and apply it, it doesn’t always look the way you want it to. You can try to find a better hatch pattern, but an easy way to deal with this problem is to create a user-defined hatch pattern. A user-defined hatch pattern just lets you specify the angle of the pattern and its scale. Changing the scale is an especially easy way to correct a hatch pattern whose spacing is too close or too wide.

Increasing the scale makes the spacing wider; decreasing the scale makes the spacing closer (narrower). A value of 1 is the default, so to make the lines closer together, use a value that is between 0 and 1.

Start the HATCH command

Before you start hatching, you might want to create a separate layer for the hatch and make it current. When you start the HATCH command (Home tab> Draw panel> Hatch), the Hatch Creation tab appears. Choose the pattern you want from the Pattern panel.

At the Pick internal point or [Select objects/seTtings]: prompt, click inside the closed area or use the Select objects option. An easy way to switch between picking internal points and selecting objects is to right click and choose the option that isn’t current from the shortcut menu. In this example, you would choose Select Objects.

Define the enclosed area properly

Sometimes, AutoCAD won’t hatch the right area. Here are some hints for defining the enclosed area:

Customize your hatches

A user-defined hatch may not give you enough flexibility. In that case, you can build your own hatch patterns.

A minor customization is to specify the hatch origin. For example, if you’re filling in a wall with a brick hatch, you may want the brick pattern to start at the lower-left corner. 

Another minor customization is to control islands, which are embedded shapes.

What about paper space?

When you display your hatches in paper space, you may be in for a rude surprise. Your hatches in scaled viewports no longer have the right spacing! The solution is to make your hatches annotative. To do so, click the Annotative button in the Hatch Creation tab’s Options panel.