Moving the AccuDraw Compass
By default, AccuDraw places its compass at the last data point location. There are, however, times when you need to take over control of the AccuDraw compass. Tentative point operations can take better advantage of AccuDraw's capabilities when you "unlock" the compass and place it wherever needed. The following covers how you do this and some interesting ways in which you can use AccuDraw to accomplish otherwise difficult operations.
AccuDraw's Floating Origin Option
At any time, you can move AccuDraw's compass to the pointer location. You do this with the <O> keyboard shortcut, which forces AccuDraw to move the compass to the current pointer location.
This occurs regardless of the tool or operation currently selected. This last point is important to recognize. AccuDraw is considered a non-modal feature in that you don't have to be in a predetermined part of a procedure in order for it to operate.
In practice, the most common use for a relocated compass origin point is to index the element under construction from an existing point. For instance, if you want to locate the corner of a block a specified distance from a given location, you can tentative snap to the given location, then press <O> to move the drawing plane origin to the snap. From there you can use AccuDraw to position the tentative point from this relocated origin point. This procedure is explained in AccuDraw and the tentative point.