TABLE OF CONTENTS Who needs to clip external references? Anyone who wants to display only a portion of an externally referenced drawing. You might xref in an entire hospital building but only want AutoCAD to display one wing in your current drawing. Not only do you want just the single wing to display, but you don't want to be slowed down by the overhead of the entire hospital drawing. When AutoCAD is set up properly, you'll find that it grants both wishes.
xclip is found in the Modify pull-down menu under Clip-Xref. It is also the third button across in the Reference toolbar (Figure 16.1).
The xclip command lets you visually clip the display of a selected external reference. It does not affect the original drawing in any way. You can clip to a predefined boundary, or you can define a boundary on the fly. You can also clip many external references at one time. At any given time, you can choose to turn the clipping off and redisplay the entire xref. There's much to the xclip command, so I'll break it up into easily digestible doses. To follow along, open a drawing containing external references or attach a couple of external references to a new drawing for practice. I'll use the drawing in Figure 16.2.
After entering the
