Mline is not a com­mon­ly used com­mand, there are two main rea­sons for this, one rea­son is that pro­fes­sion­al CAD soft­ware can be eas­i­ly used and there seems to be no need to learn Mline; anoth­er rea­son is that there are many restric­tions when using Mline, for exam­ple, we can only draw line seg­ment with Mline com­mand. Any­way, let’s explore more about Mline in CAD.

Mline is abbre­vi­a­tion for Mul­ti­ple line, we can draw mul­ti­ple par­al­lel line with this com­mand.

Mul­ti­line Style set­tings

We can cus­tomize the mul­ti­line style, for exam­ple, how many par­al­lel lines, line type, line weight and so on. We can cus­tomize the mul­ti­line style as we want, as shown in the fol­low­ing:

1. Com­mand Access:

Menu: For­mat > Mul­ti­line Style…

Com­mand: MLSTYLE

The pop-up dia­log box is shown as the fol­low­ing pic­ture:

The upper left cor­ner of the dia­log box shows the name of the mul­ti­line style: STANDARD and under­neath is mul­ti­line style list and the bot­tom is the pre­view of mul­ti­line style effect. At the right side of the dia­log box, we can cus­tomize mul­ti­line style by cre­at­ing a new style, mod­i­fy­ing an exist­ing style, rename, delete, load and save mul­ti­line style.

2. OK, let’s just mod­i­fy the default STANDARD style.

Click the Mod­i­fy but­ton, the Mod­i­fy Mul­ti­line Style dia­log box will show up as the fol­low­ing pic­ture shows.

In fact, this dia­log box is easy to under­stand. We can add descrip­tions to the mul­ti­line style at the top descrip­tion field.

At the right side of the dia­log box, we can add ele­ments and edit the Off­set, Col­or, Line­type. The default off­set is two lines 0.5 from the cen­ter line 0. We can see from the pic­ture above that a red line is added and the line type is dashed line. At the left side of the dia­log box, we can set the caps, fill col­or, choose to dis­play joints or not. Click OK but­ton to con­firm your set­tings and we can see the pre­view effect at the Mul­ti­line Style dia­log box, if you’re not sat­is­fied with the pre­view, you can con­tin­ue to mod­i­fy. Out­er arc and Inner arcs are not very easy to under­stand, we can only see the effect of Inner arcs when we set four lines, as shown in the fol­low­ing pic­ture.

How to draw mul­ti­lines?

After set­ting mul­ti­line, we can eas­i­ly draw with mul­ti­line. So we need to cus­tomize the mul­ti­line that we need before draw­ing with it.

Com­mand for mul­ti­line: MLINE

Com­mand Prompts: Cur­rent set­tings: Jus­ti­fi­ca­tion = Top, Scale = 20.00, Style = STANDARD

Spec­i­fy start point or [Justification/Scale/STyle]:

First, it shows the jus­ti­fi­ca­tion, scale and name of the cur­rent style. We can mod­i­fy any of these para­me­ters by enter­ing J/S/ST. If we want to adjust the space between mul­ti­line, we can enter S and set the scale, for exam­ple, if the space between two lines is 1 and the wall we’re going to draw is 240 wide, we can set the scale to 240. The same goes to the jus­ti­fi­ca­tion and style para­me­ters.

If all the para­me­ters have been set, we can start draw­ing mul­ti­line by spec­i­fy­ing points, as shown in the fol­low­ing pic­ture.

How to edit mul­ti­lines?

After fin­ish­ing draw­ing mul­ti­lines, we can dou­ble-click mul­ti­lines to have the Mul­ti­lines Edit Tools dia­log box popped up, or we can just enter MLEDIT and press Enter key, as shown in the fol­low­ing pic­ture.

There are 12 edit­ing tools in the popped up dia­log box, we can choose any of them accord­ing to our needs. Now assume we have two mul­ti­lines that inter­sect, we can choose three + joints form and three T forms to edit. If we choose T form, then which line to choose and where to locate the point is impor­tant, we first need to select the one that will remain after trim­ming, as shown in the fol­low­ing pic­ture.

Please remem­ber: click the lines in dif­fer­ent orders will get you dif­fer­ent results.

OK, we’ve said much about the mul­ti­line set­tings, draw­ing and edit­ing, if you want to use this com­mand, I sug­gest try and use all the dif­fer­ent para­me­ters and options in the dia­log box and com­mand line.