Info on Sortents in AutoCAD 2005 and on

If you want to know more about Sortents. It has been missing in the documentation for a while. The usage of it has also changed so some of the bits are obsolete in newer versions of AutoCAD.

Here are the bits:
1 Selection Still in use
2 Osnap Still in use
4 Redraw Obsolete
8 Slide Obsolete
16 Regen Still in use
32 Plot Still in use
64 PSOUT Obsolete

So, setting the 4/8/64 bits has no effect anymore, but we still use 127 to turn everything on for consistency.

For the 4 remaining in-use bits, turning that bit OFF will DISABLE the user-defined draworder (set by the DRAWORDER command) for that operation. I just tested selection/regen/plot and indeed you can independently disable draworder for each of those (not sure how to test the Osnap draworder bit, but it’s still referenced in the code, so it probably works). When it’s disabled, you fall back.

So SORTENTS is very much NOT obsolete, just not advertised any more–if somebody went to trouble to assign draworder, it should stay on. But performance on huge drawings with draworder applied is one reason why you might want to disable it sometimes.

- Changing a SORTENTS bit takes effect immediately except for the Regen bit, which requires a REGEN.
- When a bit is disabled, you fall back to database order (oct-tree ordering in 2D).

AutoCAD 2008 discussion group thread on the subject.