Landscape designers commonly indicate areas such as lawn, paving etc., using hatching. The image below for example, shows hatch pattern indicating a grassed area and some concrete paving in the driveway applied using gCADPlus landscape software.
These hatch patterns are loaded from a file format first pioneered by AutoCAD and are simple text files with the extension (file ending) .pat. Many hatch pattern files can be found on the internet and these can be used in the gCADPlus environment. We recommend that users load the gCADiso.pat file when starting out. This is a one-time action and once done, the path to the location of the pattern file is stored.
This movie takes a look at the way landscape CAD software such as gCADPlus handles the application of hatch pattern to closed shapes. We use Windows notepad to examine two hatch pattern files – acad.pat and gCADiso.pat. These simple text files carry instructions about the type of pattern that will be used when the HATCH command is used.
The image below shows some of the many hatch patterns suitable for use in landscape design work. These are all available in the file gCADiso.pat
