Patterning Disjointed Regions

With Method set to Flood, and Dynamic Area turned on, you can pattern disjointed elements. That is, by holding down the Ctrl key, you can select a number of enclosed regions to flood hatch or pattern, in one step. These regions highlight dynamically as you move and pause the pointer over the drawing. With this method, you still can use the Locate Interior Shapes and Locate Text settings to exclude areas in the selected regions.

Figure 1. Left: Select the regions to “flood” hatch (`Ctrl`-data points 1?3). Right: Accept to hatch the selected regions (4).

Note: A single associative pattern region can consist of many disjointed sub-regions. A sub-region may be the smallest area enclosed by many elements or simply the area of a closed shape. A sub-region can contain grouped holes and text elements.

Note: When patterning disjointed regions, turning off Drop Pattern causes the creation of a complex shape that bounds the patterned area. The hatch lines are associated to the complex shape. If you move or modify the original element(s), used to create the complex shape, the complex shape and the hatch lines will not update unless Associative Boundary was on during the patterning operation.