AutoCAD Cross-hairs Not Aligned to the UCS grid

By Andy Davis

I had a really interesting AutoCAD support call the other day. 

My client had an xref drawing attached to his main drawing and rotated through an angle.  He had realigned the UCS in the view in his main drawing with the geometry in the xref, yet the cross-hairs were not aligned with the UCS grid.

Cross-hairs not aligned to the current UCS

AutoCAD, has a system variable called SNAPANG which is used to set the snap and grid rotation angle for the current viewport relative to the current UCS.  This variable is saved in the drawing.  It is worth noting that when SNAPANG is set to a value other than 0, the lined grid does not display, as shown above.

It turns out that the value of SNAPANG in my client’s drawing had been set to the same angle as the rotated xref.  So the cross-hairs were always aligned with the geometry in the xref but not with the UCS in the main drawing.

Resetting the value of SNAPANG back to 0 realigned the cross-hairs with the UCS.

Cross-hairs aligned to the current UCS