Chapter 5: Planning for Paper 121

Reread that last sentence and then think about how often you have to pan and zoom in your drawing. If you zoom inside a viewport whose scale you’ve set — kaboom! — you just blew the scale off the map. Luckily, you can prevent yourself or anyone else from inadvertently destroying your beautifully arranged and scaled viewport by completing the final steps of viewport setup:

10.Make sure that you’re in paper space (check the UCS icon or move the crosshairs).

11.Select the boundary of the viewport whose arrangement you want to protect.

With the viewport selected, the Viewport Scale button reappears with its selectable list of scales, and right beside it is another button with a yellow unlocked padlock icon. As its tooltip indicates, its function is to lock and unlock viewports.

12.Click the Lock/Unlock Viewport button to lock the viewport scale.

The yellow unlocked padlock changes to a blue locked padlock, and the Viewport Scale button now becomes unselectable. Locking the display sets AutoCAD up for some nifty zooming . . . if you’re in paper space, a normal zoom is executed. If you’re in model space inside a viewport, a normal zoom would wreck the scale, so when you try to zoom, AutoCAD near-instantaneously switches to paper space, zooms you in, and then switches back to model space. Sheer prestidigitation!

Sometimes the perfect viewport arrangement requires that a smaller viewport be completely surrounded by a larger one. Easy enough to create, yes, and easy to select — as long as you’re in paper space.

However, if you’re in model space and you want to click from one viewport to the next to make it current, it’s impossible to make model space current in a completely surrounded viewport by clicking inside it. Let your fingers come to the rescue: The Ctrl+R key combination cycles through model space in all drawing viewports, even if they’re completely surrounded by other viewports.

And there you have your 12-step program to layout bliss! All that setup had a purpose, of course: to enable you to print perfect paper plots (or plot-perfect paper prints, if you prefer to see it that way). We cover plotting in depth in Chapter 16, but a short introductory word here might be useful.

About Paper Space Layouts and Plotting

As this chapter describes, you can use AutoCAD’s paper space feature to compose one or more layouts for plotting your drawing in particular ways. Each layout lives on a separate tab, which you click at the bottom of the drawing area — or in a secret hiding place if you’ve hidden the Model and Layout tabs. AutoCAD saves plot settings (plot device, paper size, plot scale, and so on) separately for each of the layouts, as well as model space.

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122 Part I: AutoCAD 101

Whether to plot model space or a layout in a drawing depends entirely on how the drawing was set up. If you or someone else went through a layoutsetup procedure similar to the one in this chapter, you probably should plot the layout. If not, plot model space.

Viewport boundaries will print if you don’t pay attention to where you create them. What that means is that each drawing view has a nice rectangular border around it. Nice, but a definite no-no in every drafting office. In Chapter 6, we introduce you to object properties, including probably the most important one, layers. You can define a layer so that objects on it do not plot, and that’s where you should create your viewports.

If you don’t have any paper space drawings handy, you can use one of the AutoCAD sample drawings. Refer to the tip near the beginning of the “Setting Up a Layout in Paper Space” section, earlier in the chapter, for where to find the sample drawings.

Some different ways of plotting the same model can be handled in a single paper space layout with different page setups. See Chapter 16 for more details. If your projects require lots of drawings, you can parlay layouts into sheet sets — a feature that makes for more sophisticated creation, management, plotting, and electronic transfer of multisheet drawing sets.

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Part II

Let There Be Lines

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Lines, circles, and other elements of geometry make up the heart of your drawing. AutoCAD

offers many different drawing commands, many ways to use them to draw objects precisely, and many properties for controlling the on-screen and plotted appearance of objects. After you draw your geometry, you’ll probably spend at least as much time editing it as your design and drawings evolve. And in the process, you’ll need to zoom in and out and pan all around to see how the entire drawing is coming together.

Drawing geometry, editing it, and changing the displayed view are the foundation of the drawing process; this part shows you how to make that foundation solid.

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6

Manage Your Properties

In This Chapter

Managing layers

Managing object properties like color, linetype, and lineweight

Copying layers and other named objects between drawings with DesignCenter

CAD programs are different from other drawing programs. You have to pay attention to little details, like object properties and the precision of the points that you specify when you draw and edit objects. If you ignore

these details and just start drawing, you’ll end up with a mess of sloppy geometry that’s hard to edit, view, and plot.

This chapter introduces you to object properties, one set of AutoCAD tools and techniques that helps you prevent CAD messes. Chapter 7

explains the most important precision drawing techniques that you need to observe to create usable AutoCAD drawings. The information in these two chapters is essential

to understand before you start drawing and editing objects, procedures that we describe in Chapters 8 through 11.

When you first start using AutoCAD, one of its most overwhelming aspects is the number of property settings and precision controls that you need to pay attention to — even when you draw a simple line. Unlike many other programs, it’s not enough to draw a line in a more-or-less-adequate location and then slap some color on it. But all those settings and

controls can inspire the feeling that you have to learn

how to drive a Formula 1 car to make a trip down the street. (The advantage is that after you are comfortable in the driver’s seat, AutoCAD takes you on the long-haul trips and gets you there faster.)

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