50 Part I: AutoCAD 101

Keeping tabs on palettes

Palettes are refined (well-mannered) versions of dialog boxes. Unlike regular dialog boxes, which insist on your undivided attention as long as they’re open, palettes stay discreetly in the background as you carry on with

other tasks. AutoCAD still has many dialog boxes, but over the past several releases, palettes have replaced quite a few former dialog boxes.

AutoCAD 2013 contains more than a dozen palettes (less than a dozen in AutoCAD LT). Unless noted otherwise, you can open any of these palettes from the Palettes panel of the View tab. The more commonly used palettes are

Properties, DesignCenter, and Content Explorer: These palettes are used to control object properties, and to find and display named objects (layers, blocks, and so on) for copying them between drawings. We cover the first two in Chapter 6.

Tool Palettes: Instead of paint colors, each tool palette holds content (drawing symbols and hatch patterns) and/or commands (not regular AutoCAD commands — what would be the point? — but macros that make commands do specific things). You can create your own tool palettes, but the ones that come with AutoCAD contain dozens of symbols you can drag into your drawing — check ’em out! When you get a little more proficient in AutoCAD, tool palettes are the second easiest way of customizing AutoCAD to improve productivity and help ensure compliance with CAD standards. The easiest way is to set up custom templates for new drawings as we discuss in Chapter 4. For best results, you should use both methods.

Sheet Set Manager: Provides tools for managing all of a project’s drawings as a sheet set. We don’t cover sheet sets in AutoCAD 2013 For Dummies.

External References: Used to attach external files to the current drawing; file types include raster images, Drawing Web Format (DWF or DWFx) files, PDF files, MicroStation DGN files, and other drawing files. We discuss attaching external reference files in Chapter 18.

Markup Set Manager: Displays design and drafting review comments from users of Autodesk Design Review. For more information on markup sets, see the online help.

QuickCalc: A handy pushbutton scientific calculator that hides out on the Home tab’s Utilities panel. You’ll know if you need this.

Layer Properties Manager: The main control center for managing the layers on your drawing. The palettized Layer Properties Manager not only stays open while you’re doing other things, but also applies any changes you make instantly in the drawing. The Layer Properties Manager can be found on the Layers panel of the Home tab.

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Using the View and Home tabs is one way of opening palettes. Alternatively, several palettes have keyboard shortcuts. You can toggle these by pressing Ctrl+1 (Properties), Ctrl+2 (DesignCenter), Ctrl+3 (Tool Palettes), Ctrl+4 (Sheet Set Manager), Ctrl+7 (Markup Set Manager), or Ctrl+8 (QuickCalc).

Down the main stretch: The drawing area

After all these warm-up laps, you’re probably itching for the main event — the AutoCAD drawing area. This is where you do your drawing, of course. 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

One of the initially disorienting things about AutoCAD is that finished drawings can be composed of objects drawn in different spaces, which AutoCAD indicates with either two status bar buttons, or two or more tabs at the bottom left of the drawing area:

Model space: Where you create and modify the objects that represent things in the real world — walls, widgets, waterways, or whatever.

Paper space: Where you create particular views of these objects for plotting, usually 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.

When you click the Model button on the status bar or the Model tab, you see pure, unadulterated model space, as shown in Figure 2-12. When you click the Layout button, you see a paper space layout, as shown in Figure 2-13. A completed layout usually includes one or more viewports, which are windows that display all or part of model space at a particular scale. A layout also usually includes a title block or other objects that exist only in the layout and don’t appear when you click the Model tab. (Think of the viewport as a window looking into model space and the title block as a frame around the window.) Thus, a layout displays model space and paper space objects together, and AutoCAD lets you draw and edit objects in either space. See Chapter 5 for information about creating paper space layouts and Chapter 16 for the lowdown on plotting them.

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52 Part I: AutoCAD 101

Figure 2-12: A building model ready for editing in model space.

Figure 2-13: Freshly laid out in paper space.

When a layout is current, you can move the crosshairs back and forth between model space and paper space while remaining in the layout. You can’t be in both spaces at the same time, however; if paper space is current, you can click directly on top of a model space object, but it won’t be

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