Clipping with multiple boundaries

Here’s a neat little trick that can be very useful. Have you ever wanted to clip an object, say a viewport or xref, with more than one boundary? Well there is a way to achieve the result you want, but using a single boundary.

Consider this – you want to clip an object using the outer rectangle below, but you want the inner rectangle to be a hole through the middle. Hmm this is a problem if you can only select one clipping boundary isn’t it…

The solution is to make it a single boundary. Draw the outer rectangle, then just draw a line into the new location, draw that boundary, then draw on top of the line you drew to connect to the inner boundary back to the outer boundary and close the polyline:

Here’s the same thing, but with a slight gap between the overlapping lines so that you can see what I mean:

This works with clipping xrefs, blocks, viewports, anything that requires a clipping boundary.

I hope this little tip helps you as much as it has helped me. Also, I’d like to recommend that you subscribe below if you found this useful – I have many more tips to share!

Will

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