AutoCAD For Dummies. Ralph Grabowski
dozen palettes (fewer than a dozen in AutoCAD LT). Unless noted otherwise, you can open any of these palettes from the Palettes panel of the View tab. I describe just a few of them, in the appropriate chapters.
Down the main stretch: The drawing area
After you’ve taken some warm-up laps, you’re probably itching for the main event. The AutoCAD drawing area is where you do your drawing. Gee, what a surprise! In the course of creating drawings, you click points to specify locations and distances, click objects to select them for editing, and zoom and pan to get a better view of what you’re working on.
Most of this book shows you how to interact with the drawing area, but you should know a few things upfront.
Model space and paper space layouts
AutoCAD operates in two parallel universes, called spaces, which AutoCAD indicates with a status bar button and two or more tabs in the lower-left section of the drawing area:
Model: Where you create and modify the objects that represent things in the real world, such as wheels, wires, walls, widgets, waterways, or whatever.
Paper: Where you create particular views of these model-space objects in preparation for printing, often with a title block around them. Paper space comprises one or more layouts, each of which can contain a different arrangement of model space views and different title block information. You can create many layouts of a single drawing. See Chapter 12 for information about creating paper space layouts, and see Chapter 16 for the lowdown on plotting them.
Drawing on the drawing area
Here are a few things you should know about the AutoCAD drawing area:
Get in the habit of looking at the command line after every action you take. Efficient, confident use of AutoCAD requires that you continually glance from the drawing area to the command line (to see those all-important prompts) and then back up to the drawing area. This sequence isn’t a natural reflex for most people, and that’s why the Dynamic Input tooltip at the cursor was introduced. But you still get information from the command line that you don’t get anywhere else.
When you click in the AutoCAD drawing area, you’re almost always performing an action. Clicking at random in the drawing area isn’t quite as harmless in AutoCAD as it is in many other Windows programs. AutoCAD interprets clicks as specifying a point or selecting objects for editing. If you get confused, press Esc a couple of times to clear the current operation and return to the waiting command line.
You can still right-click. In most cases, you can right-click in the drawing area to display a menu with some options for the current situation.
Fun with F1
Unfortunately, in AutoCAD, F1 doesn’t stand for Formula One. Pressing F1 at any time opens the online Help window, shown in Figure 2-10, as does clicking the question mark.
As is the case with most Windows programs, AutoCAD Help is context-sensitive. For example, if you start the Line command and just don’t know what to do next, Help will, er, help. You can browse the online Product Documentation from the AutoCAD Help page or type words in the Search box to look for specific topics. In this book, I sometimes direct you to the AutoCAD online Help system for information about advanced topics.
FIGURE 2-10: Help is at your F1 fingertip.
Chapter 3
A Lap around the CAD Track
IN THIS CHAPTER
Chapters 1 and 2 introduce you to the AutoCAD world and to the AutoCAD interface. Other chapters in this book present the techniques that underlie good drafting practice. By now, you’re probably eager to start moving the cursor around and drawing something. This chapter leads you on a gentle tour of the most common CAD drafting functions, including setting up a new drawing, drawing and editing objects, zooming and panning the view, and printing (or plotting) a drawing. I don’t go into full detail about every option of every command, but I give you a feel for what it can do. Go ahead and slam the tires, and don’t worry about putting a dent in the doors!
In this chapter, you create the drawing of an architectural detail of a base plate and column. Even if you don’t work in architecture or building construction, this exercise gives you some simple shapes to work with