Below example will show about how to work effectively on Rotated entities/ Areas in drawing:

In CAD, entities you draw on drawing screen are based on X, Y coordinate system, this coordinate system is called World Coordinate System (WCS). 

The coordinate system you define will be a Custom Coordinate System (CCS) in DraftSight.

We can use Custom Coordinate System (CCS) to work easily on Rotated entities/ Areas in drawing.

In order to understand better, let’s consider a simple example of a rotated entity as shown in screen capture below:

The steps are as follows:

1. In the DraftSight® menu bar, click Tools > New CCS and choose the option as 3 Point (or choose “Entity” and select the entity drawn in the graphics area to align CCS with it). Then you are required to specify those 3 points.

2. Specify an origin point for the custom coordinate system.

3. Specify a point through which the positive X-axis should run.

4.Specify a point in the positive area of the XY-plane (this point needs not be located on the Y-axis).

5. As you can notice in the below screen capture that CCS is aligned to the angled entity in the drawing area.

6. Now when you modify entity or create entities, it will be aligned to current CCS as shown in the below screen capture.

7. If you like to work with objects aligned to screen; you can set the plan view to the current coordinate system (the current construction plane) using ‘PLANVIEW’ command in DraftSight.

See below screen capture.

a. Type’ PLANVIEW’ at the command prompt.

b. Specify Option “Active ccs” to set the plan view to the active coordinate system.

 
8. After editing the angled portion of your drawing; you can switch back to the Word Coordinate System, from DraftSight menu bar, click Tools > New CCS > World. Again use ‘PLANVIEW’ command to set the plan view to the current coordinate system. See the below screen capture.

Note: You can force the view to set automatically to the plan view whenever the coordinate system changes. For that:

1.  In DraftSight menu click Tools and choose Options (or type Options).
2. In the dialog box, click Drawing Settings.
3. Expand Coordinate System > Options.
4. Select Update view when coordinate system changes.
5. Click OK.