Moving and Duplicating a Selection

Cut, Copy, Copy with Base Point, Paste and Paste in Place — moving geometry between drawings, between windows and into other programs, and what travels with it.

This chapter is about the clipboard — the same copy-and-paste you use everywhere else on your computer, applied to drawings.

Its job is moving geometry between places: another tab, another copy of Pingendum 2D, or another program entirely.

To duplicate something inside one drawing, the clipboard is usually the wrong tool. Copy and Array are better, because they let you place each copy exactly.

Prerequisites

You can select objects — see Selecting Objects.

The five commands

Command	Key	What it does
Cut	`Ctrl+X`	Copies the selection to the clipboard and deletes it from the drawing
Copy	`Ctrl+C`	Copies the selection to the clipboard
Copy with Base Point	`Ctrl+Shift+C`	Copies, and asks you which point the paste will be positioned by
Paste	`Ctrl+V`	The objects hang off the cursor; click or type where they go
Paste in Place	`Ctrl+Shift+V`	Drops them at their own original coordinates

Paste, or Paste in Place?

This is the choice that actually matters, so here is the difference in practice.

Paste hands you the objects on the cursor and lets you put them where you like. Use it when you are bringing in a detail and positioning it by eye or by snap.

Paste in Place puts them at exactly the coordinates they had in the drawing they came from. Use it when the two drawings share a coordinate system — a survey base and your own layout, say. Nothing shifts, and everything lines up with no snapping at all.

Copy with Base Point is the refinement on top. It lets you choose which point of the selection sits on the cursor while you paste. Copy a door with its hinge as the base point, and you can then snap that hinge straight onto a wall.

💡 Workflow Guide: Copying a detail with Copy with Base Point and picking its bottom-left corner as the base, then switching to a different drawing tab and pasting — the chosen corner lands exactly on the end of a line there, because the base point is what the cursor carries. Slightly sped up.

What comes with a paste

Objects do not arrive naked. Three things travel with them, and one of them can surprise you.

Thing	What happens
Layers	Objects keep their layers, by name. If the destination drawing has no layer of that name, it is created
Blocks	Their block definitions come too, so a pasted block still knows what it is
Units	Between drawings in different units, objects are scaled to suit. Objects from a drawing in metres paste 1,000 times larger into a drawing in millimetres — which is correct, and almost always what you want

The one to watch is layers. Pasting from a drawing with a different layer convention quietly adds its layers to yours. After a big paste from an unfamiliar source, glance at the Layers panel to see what arrived.

Pasting into other programs

Paste into a word processor or a presentation and the other program receives a picture, drawn in the objects' own colours on a white background.

Programs that accept PDF get it at its true size, so a detail pasted into a report comes out properly scaled rather than as a fuzzy bitmap. That makes the clipboard a perfectly reasonable way to get a drawing into a document without exporting anything.

For exchange with other CAD programs, do not use the clipboard — use DXF. See Exchanging DXF.

Things worth knowing

Paste is greyed out when the clipboard holds no objects. If it looks disabled, nothing drawing-shaped has been copied yet.
If the context bar's field has the keyboard, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V edit that text rather than the drawing. Press Esc first if you meant to copy geometry.
Deleting is not cutting. Delete and Backspace remove the selection without putting it on the clipboard, so you cannot paste it back — use Ctrl+Z instead.

Small moves need none of this

For a nudge or a tweak, skip the clipboard entirely:

Arrow keys move the selection by one grid snap step.
Grips drag individual points — see Editing with Grips.
Move (M) repositions exactly, from a base point you choose.

Next Steps

Next: Transforming Geometry

Moving and Duplicating a Selection

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