AutoCAD 2005 For Dummies (2004)

340 Part IV: Share and Share Alike

Industry standards

Even if you’re lucky or perseverant enough to get a well-rounded set of CAD standards in your office, that may not be the end of it. CAD-savvy people from different companies who collaborate on projects often want to minimize the pain of inconsistency during drawing exchange. Although each company may have its own CAD standards house in order, there’s no way that all those standards will be the same. Thus, one or more companies (often the lead consultant) may impose a set of project-specific CAD standards. Project-specific standards don’t necessarily need to be as detailed as a full-blown company CAD standards document, but depending on the project and the person who created the project-specific CAD standards, they might be.

The result of this confusing muddle of industry practices, company CAD standards, and project-specific CAD standards is that you find yourself switching among different standards as you work on different projects. Before you start making drawings, find out whether any particular CAD standards apply. It’s a lot easier to start off conforming with those standards than to fix nonconforming drawings later.

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What Needs to Be Standardized?

If you are in a company or on a project without any CAD standards, put together at least a minimal set of guidelines. First, impose some consistency on plotted appearance and use of layers. If you make a few rules for yourself before you start, you’ll end up with drawings that are more professional looking and easier to edit — and more likely to be useful on future projects.

A spreadsheet or word processing program is great for documenting your CAD standards decisions as they firm up. Many CAD standards components work best as tabular lists of layers, colors, and so on. (See Tables 15-1 and 15-2 in this chapter for examples.) Use the cells in a spreadsheet or the tables feature in a word processor to organize your CAD standards documentation.

Before you start, make sure that you’re familiar with managing properties (Chapter 4) and plot styles (Chapter 12). You need a good understanding to make intelligent decisions about your plotting and layer standards. (If you want to make unintelligent decisions, don’t worry about those chapters!)

Plotting

If you plan to use color-dependent plot styles (most people do), develop a color-to-lineweight plotting chart like Table 15-1. If you choose the more logical but lonelier named plot styles approach, make a similar chart, with plot style names instead of color in the first column. (See Chapter 12 for information about color-dependent and named plot styles.) After you complete a plotting chart, create a plot style table (CBT file for color-dependent plot styles or STB file for named plot styles), as in Chapter 12.

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Figure 15-2:

Checking standards.

Check!

AutoCAD standards checking tools require an AutoCAD Drawing Standards (DWS) file. You create a DWS file from a drawing with all the allowed layers, dimension styles, text styles, and linetypes; use File Save As to save it as a DWS (not DWG) file. The DWS file defines acceptable named objects for the Check Standards and Batch Standards Checker utilities. See “standards files, creating” in AutoCAD’s online help system for information.

AutoCAD 2005 monitors CAD standards compliance when you’ve specified standards for the current drawing. By default, a balloon notification appears from the right end of the status bar. CAD managers can trade the balloon for a message that offers to fix the mistake. To configure the notification level, click the Settings button in the Configure Standards dialog box.

If your company does have CAD standards in place, someone may have created custom tools to help you comply with those standards. For example, the CAD manager may have put together template drawings with customized settings or block libraries of standard symbols. CAD managers sometimes create custom menu choices, scripts, or utility programs for the company’s CAD standards.

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Many of the features described in this chapter have undergone frequent tinkering, revision, and refocusing in recent AutoCAD versions. AutoCAD 2005 adds new ETRANSMIT and PUBLISH capabilities to keep up with the new sheet sets feature, which is described in Chapter 14. The Standard toolbar includes a new Markup Set Manager for those who receive drawing markups from users of Autodesk DWF Composer. (DWF Composer is Autodesk’s newest effort to draw more people into using the DWF format. The idea is that architects, engineers, and others who don’t themselves use AutoCAD can mark up drawings by using DWF Composer and then transmit those markups to an AutoCAD drafter, who incorporates the changes into the DWG files.)

This chapter shows you how — and when — to use AutoCAD’s Internet features. I also cover how the Internet features can connect with traditional CAD tasks, such as plotting. The emphasis of this chapter is on useful, no-nonsense ways of taking advantage of the Internet in your CAD work.

Your ticket to most of the features described in this chapter is an account with an Internet service provider (ISP). You probably already have Internet access through work or a private ISP account — or both; but if not, now is the time to get connected. Other CAD users will expect to be able to send drawings to you and receive them from you via e-mail. Software companies, including Autodesk, expect you to have Web access in order to download software updates and support information. Dial-up modem access to the Internet is acceptable, but if you’re doing much drawing exchange or want to be able to download software updates without waiting all day, consider springing for broadband access, such as DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) or cable modem.

The Internet and AutoCAD: An Overview

As with all things Internet-y, AutoCAD 2005’s Internet features are a hodgepodge of the genuinely useful, the interesting but still somewhat immature or difficult to use, and the downright foolish. I steer you toward features and techniques that are reliable and widely used today. I warn you about “stupid pet trick” features that may impress a 12-year-old computer geek but leave your project leader wondering what planet you come from. On the other hand, a few of today’s questionable features are likely to become the reliable, commonplace ones of tomorrow. I give you enough context to see how everything works and where it may lead. Table 16-1 summarizes the AutoCAD 2005 Internet features and tells you where in this book to find more information.

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