How to use Mline in CAD?

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.