Entity Snaps are "Jumpy," what do I do?

Sometimes people will report that when they are working in a drawing that they entity snaps don't allow them to pick the exact location in a CAD file.  Sometimes they describe them as "jumping around."

This can have a number of causes:

Causes that are limited to just one drawing:

SNAP:

The setting snap is saved with the drawing.  If SNAP is set to ON, the CAD program will force your mouse to snap only to rounded off coordinates.  In the example below I've typed SNAP:

Snap is off (x and y = 0.500): ON/Rotate/Style/Type/Aspect/<Snap spacing>: on
(Snap is currently On)

While SNAP is on the mouse will always jump to the nearest .5 unit and no closer.

Resolve by typing SNAP and then typing OFF:

Snap is on, x and y = 0.500: OFF/Rotate/Style/Type/Aspect/<Snap spacing>: off
(Snap is currently Off)

XREFS:

Sometimes you have a really large drawing and many other xrefs are attached.  When you try to snap to one of the XREF portions the mouse seems to jump randomly about.  This can happen with large XREFS.  The solution is to use the "Drawing Cleanup Wizard" option to bind xrefs.  This will insert all xref drawings into your "master" drawing and seems to resolve the performance issue.

Graphics:

Sometimes the  snaps are working correctly, but they seem to be snapping to a location that does not visually match the entity as it is displayed on the monitor.  This cause is also associated with other properties or symptoms:

• Coordinate values are large (UTM or State Planes for example)
• Text entities appear to be distorted (at worst they look like another language entirely)
• arcs appear to be degraded so that they display as a polygon rather than a smooth curve

Typing _REGEN" often clears this up in current versions of IntelliCAD.  See here for an article that went into more detail to resolve the issue with older versions of IntelliCAD.  If these steps don't resolve the issue you may be looking at an issue caused by incompatibility with your computer's video hardware, see here for an article on nvidia graphics cards  or see here for an article on AMD graphics cards or ask Support for more guidance.