I have a fairly simple, flat surface in a drawing. (I will attach the drawing.) I would like to extract the edges of this surface into a line drawing so I can use part of the edges in a loft command. I could just copy the edges except one of them is curve, and it would be nice to just extract it rather than trying to copy it exactly. Is there a way to do this?
Thanks,
Mark

Hi Mark, usually the method for extracting edges is to copy them - but if you want them to remain in the exact same spot then you can copy them by using the clipboard Copy and Paste instead of the Transform > Copy command.

When you say "rather than trying to copy it exactly." I'm not quite sure what that means - do you mean that you want to make some curves in the exact same spot as the edges instead of doing what the Transform > Copy command does which is more oriented towards placing duplicates at some other displaced location?

If so then select the edges that you want to extract, then do Ctrl+C to copy them to the clipboard as curves, then do Ctrl+V to paste those curves into the model, you will now have new standalone curve objects as new objects in addition to the edges. There are also buttons for clipboard copy and paste on the Edit palette - that's a slightly different copy mechanism than the Transform > Copy command.


Also one trick to speed up selecting the edges is that you can select just 1 edge of the surface and then do Ctrl+A to select all the other edges rather than doing them one at a time. That can be useful if there are a lot of edges involved. Once you have selected one edge then the "Select all" action that Ctrl+A does will focus just on edges of that object and select all of them.

Hope this helps, please let me know if I did not understand properly.

- Michael

Thanks, Michael. I'm sorry to bother you with such a simple problem, especially since I figured it out for myself after I posted the question. You've made most things simple to do, but sometimes I get brain freeze (and I'm not even eating ice cream!), and I miss the simple things. Thanks for your patience.

Just so you'll know, when I talked about "copying the curve exactly", I meant trying to draw an exact copy of it.

Thanks again for a great program! Sometimes I just forget how truly easy it is to use.

Mark

No problem Mark, I'm glad you have it solved now!

- Michael