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the Drawing Utilities section, choose Drawing Properties to open the Drawing Properties dialog box; then click the Summary tab. Enter the drawing scale and the drawing scale factor you’re using in the Comments area, plus any other information you think useful.
Don’t confuse drawing properties (which are really file properties) with your drawing’s object properties — they’re different things. The properties you enter here can help you or someone you love when she opens your drawing and wonders how you set it up. Object properties are a big enough topic to merit their own chapter — see Chapter 6.
Figure 4-7: Surveying your drawing’s properties.
Making Templates Your Own
You can create a template from any DWG file by using the Save Drawing As dialog box. Follow these steps to save your drawing as a template:
1.Click Save As on the Quick Access Toolbar.
The Save Drawing As dialog box appears, as shown in Figure 4-8.
2.From the Files of Type drop-down list, choose AutoCAD Drawing Template (*.dwt) or AutoCAD LT Drawing Template (*.dwt).
3.Navigate to the folder where you want to store the drawing template.
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106 Part I: AutoCAD 101
Figure 4-8: Saving a drawing as a template and applying options.
The AutoCAD 2013 default folder for drawing templates is buried deep in the bowels of your Windows user profile, which by default isn’t visible in Windows Explorer. Hey, we never said this made any sense! Save your templates there if you want them to appear in AutoCAD’s Select Template list. You can save your templates in another folder, but if you want to use them later, you have to navigate to that folder every time you want to use them. See the Technical Stuff paragraph that follows this procedure for additional suggestions.
4.Enter a name for the drawing template in the File Name text box and click Save.
A dialog box for the template description and units appears.
5.Specify the template’s measurement units (English or Metric) in the drop-down list.
Enter the key info now — you can’t do it later unless you save the template to a different name. Don’t bother filling in the Description field; AutoCAD doesn’t display it in the Select Template dialog box. Don’t worry about the New Layer Notification area shown in Figure 4-8 for now; we tell you all about drawing layers in Chapter 6.
6.Click OK to save the file.
The Template Options dialog box closes, and the template is saved to your hard drive.
7.To save your drawing as a regular drawing, click Save As on the Quick Access Toolbar.
The Save Drawing As dialog box appears again.
8.From the Files of Type drop-down list, choose AutoCAD 2013 Drawing (*.dwg).
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Choose the AutoCAD LT equivalent, if that’s your version. AutoCAD 2013 uses a new file format that can’t be opened by earlier releases. Choose a previous DWG file format if you want to be able to open your drawing in AutoCAD 2012 or earlier, but note that some features introduced in later releases may not translate properly to earlier ones, and probably won’t survive a round trip back into 2013.
9.Navigate to the folder where you want to store the drawing.
Use a different folder from the one with your template drawings.
10.Enter the name of the drawing in the File Name text box and click Save.
The file is saved. Now, when you save it in the future, the regular file — not the template file — is updated.
The QNEW (Quick NEW) command, when properly configured, can bypass the Select Template dialog box and create a new drawing from your favorite template. The first button on the Quick Access Toolbar — the button with the plain white sheet of paper — runs the newer QNEW command instead of the older NEW command.
To put the Quick into QNEW, though, you have to tell AutoCAD which default template to use:
1.Click the Application button, and then click the Options button at the lower-right corner of the Application Menu.
2.On the Files tab, choose Template Settings Default Template File
Name for QNEW.
The QNEW default file name setting is None, which causes QNEW to act just like NEW (that is, QNEW opens the Select Template dialog box). Specify the name of your favorite template here, and you get a new drawing file based on it every time you click QNEW.
AutoCAD 2013 stores drawing templates and many other support files under your Windows user folder. To discover where your template folder is hiding, open the Options dialog box. On the Files tab, choose Template Settings Drawing Template File Location, as shown in Figure 4-9.
You don’t have to keep your template files where that bossy Mister Gates tells you. Create a folder that you can find easily (for example, C:\Acad-
templates or F:\Acad-custom\templates on a network drive), put the templates that you actually use there, and change the Drawing Template File Location setting so that it points to your new template folder.
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Figure 4-9: Seek and you shall find your template folder.
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5
Planning for Paper
In This Chapter
Setting up paper space layouts
Buttons or tabs for layout fashionistas
Looking into viewports
Working in paper space
Most of what the earlier chapters look at revolves around setting up the model space environment — that infinitely large, three-dimensional
realm wherein you create your gleaming towers, your wondrous electronic gadgetry, . . . or your garden shed or your angle bracket. However, you may have picked up a hint here or there that AutoCAD has a whole different environment known as paper space.
The final product of all this setup, remember, is a printed drawing on a piece of paper. In most industries, paper drawings are legal contract documents, so it’s pretty important that they’re understandable and easily
read. The first part of that process is configuring the sheet layout in paper space, which we explain in this chapter. For the actual process of outputting either model space or layouts to printer or plotter, see Chapter 16.
Chapter 2 introduces you to the two spaces — model and paper — and Chapter 4 explains how to configure model space for efficient drawing. Before you plunge into paper space, a quick recap of model space is in order.
Model space is the drawing environment that’s current when the
Model tab (not the Model button) on the status bar is active. Model space is where you create the “real” objects that you’re drawing, so these objects are referred to as model geometry whether they’re 2D or 3D entities. When the Model tab is active, you see objects in model space only — anything in paper space is invisible.
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