A customer asked us how to load custom hatch patterns into AutoCAD as they see that you can download free ones from the internet.
The first step to download these new hatch pattern files. The new patterns are actually text based files with a file extension of .pat. A couple of site where you can download hatch pattern are: http://www.dotsoft.com/acadhatch.htm and http://www.cadhatch.com/ . There are many other site on the internet and you will find them by simple doing a google search. Here is the link of the search I did https://www.google.co.za/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=autocad%20hatch%20pattern%20files.
For this blog I went to the Dotsoft website and downloaded the Spanish Roof tile pattern.
I downloaded the Spanish Tile Roofing pattern file onto the Desktop. The filename is called “spantile.pat”. What you now have to do is to copy the pattern file into a path where AutoCAD looks for files to use, in this case the general AutoCAD “Support” file path.
Browse to the location where you saved the pattern file, right click on the file, cut the file and past it into the following locations for the different Window operating systems:
Windows Vista, 7, 8, 8.1 and 10.
C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\Autodesk\AutoCAD 20xx\Rxx.x\enu\Support
Windows XP:
C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Application Data\Autodesk\AutoCAD 20xx\Rxx.x\enu\Support
Note: For AutoCAD 2009 and earlier, the default hatch pattern location is:
C:\Program Files\Autodesk\AutoCAD 20xx\Support
Now start AutoCAD, zoom to an area you want to hatch and then click to hatch tool.
Click the expand button on the bottom right of the pattern panel to see more hatch patterns and scroll down.
Search for and select the new hatch pattern you have downloaded, in this case called SPANTILE.
Go through the process of creating your hatch but select an internal area. Note that I also changed the scale to 100 before I clicked the internal area.
Note that this is only one way of adding hatch patterns to your AutoCAD installation. There are other ways to add Hatch patterns to your installation as well.
