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What to do when "it won't hatch!"
Just about everyone has seen at one time or another the message: "Hatch
spacing too dense, or dash size too small." right after you've
unsuccessfully tried to hatch an area. This frustrating message has the obvious
workaround of dividing up the area to be hatched into smaller areas with some
temporary lines or with lines on a "non plot" layer so the hatch will remain
associative. While this works fine in most instances it is also helpful to
understand what is happening when you receive this message so a less painful
solution can be used.
AutoCAD by default limits you to 10,000 lines/dots in a hatch pattern. When
you exceed this number you will get the infamous "Hatch spacing too dense, or
dash size too small." and no hatch. This limit is set in the AutoCAD environment
variable "MAXHATCH". The good news is that you can make this value larger. We
are not sure what the upper limit is but we've entered 100,000,000 in release
2006 AutoCAD and it took it. Depending on the types of hatching you typically do
and how often you get this message you may adjust your value accordingly. The
format for setting this value is the following entered at the command prompt:
(SETENV "MAXHATCH" "700000")
Note that both the "MAXHATCH" and the value that you are entering (700,000
above) must be in quotes.
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