BANKSLOPE draws the scalloped run of lines that marks an earth bank on a site plan — between the top of a slope and its toe, long and short alternating, each one bowed the opposite way to its neighbour.
What BankSlope does
Cuttings, embankments, pond edges, bunds, spoil heaps. Pick the top line, pick the bottom, and the hatching is laid between them.
The alternating long and short is the convention: full length to the toe, then half, then full again.
How to use it
- Load the routine with
APPLOAD, or put it on your support file search path. - Type
BANKSLOPE. - Pick the top of slope.
- Pick the toe of slope.
- Adjust the scallop size if the default does not suit the drawing scale.
How it works
Each scallop is drawn between the top line and the bottom line at the point it happens to be, not to a fixed length. So where the bank is wide the scallops stretch, and where it narrows they shorten.
That is what makes the hatching read as a slope rather than a row of ticks. A fixed-length version looks passable on a uniform bank and obviously wrong the moment the bank tapers, which on a real site plan it always does.
The geometry is built directly, with the bulge set as each vertex is written. The alternative — drawing a run of separate polylines, joining them with PEDIT against a selection window, then walking the result setting bulges vertex by vertex — works until the selection window catches something else on the drawing, at which point that gets joined in too.
The size is held in the routine, not in a system variable. Parking a setting in a general-purpose variable like USERR2 means anything else in the drawing using it for its own purposes silently changes the scallop size — and setting it here breaks whatever that was.
Notes and limits
- Pick the top of slope first. The alternation runs from there.
- The scallop size is proportional to the drawing, so check it once at your working scale and it holds.
- The current layer is restored on every path, including cancel and error — so an interrupted run does not leave you drawing on the hatching layer.
- One undo group covers the whole bank.
Download and details
| Name | BankSlope — scalloped hatching between the top and toe of a bank |
| Download | BankSlope.lsp — 9.0 KB, plain AutoLISP source. Downloads directly; no zip to unpack. |
| Type | AutoCAD AutoLISP routine |
| Command | BANKSLOPE |
| Requires | nothing beyond a CAD platform with AutoLISP. |
| Source size | 9.0 KB, 207 lines |
| Error handling | Yes — a *error* handler restores every system variable it changed, on cancel as well as on error. |
| Undo | The whole operation is wrapped in a single undo group, so one U reverses all of it. |
| Compatibility | AutoCAD (any release with AutoLISP), BricsCAD, ZWCAD, GstarCAD, ProgeCAD and other IntelliCAD-based platforms. AutoCAD LT needs a LISP enabler. No .NET, no ObjectARX, no installer. |
| Author | YZ, August 2026 |
| Licence | Free to use, supplied “as is” with no warranty. |
References
- Free AutoCAD hatch patterns — 300+ .PAT files, for the other site materials
- CURVEHUG LISP — placing symbols along the top of the bank
- More free AutoLISP routines on this site
- Wisey’s Steel Shapes — free structural steel section drawing program