11

Edit for Credit

In This Chapter

Moving, copying, and stretching objects

Manipulating whole objects

Changing pieces of objects

Editing object properties

Fixing your mistakes

In Chapter 10, you discover that AutoCAD has several different methods of modifying drawing objects. You also learn how to select those objects in the first place so you can edit them. Now it’s time to roll up your sleeves

and get dirty — in this chapter, we introduce the primary edit commands in AutoCAD.

The following sections cover the most important AutoCAD editing commands, using command-first editing mode.

As we explain in Chapter 10, command-first editing — or verb-noun editing in AutoCAD-ese — is one of three different approaches to modifying objects in AutoCAD. We concentrate on this method, where you start a command and then pick the objects on which the command will act, because it’s the only method that works for all editing commands in AutoCAD.

Your AutoCAD Toolkit

Table 11-1 lists AutoCAD’s most frequently used editing com-

mands. It shows the tool icons found on the Ribbon, the classic toolbar, and the classic menu, and it gives the official command name with corre-

sponding alias (where one exists) for the typists in the room. Ribbon buttons are on the Home tab’s Modify panel in the Drafting & Annotation workspace. In the AutoCAD Classic workspace, look for these commands on the Modify or Modify II toolbar and Modify menu.

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216 Part II: Let There Be Lines

The ARRAY command underwent such a massive revision in AutoCAD 2012 that it hardly qualifies as a Modify command any more. We cover the associative array feature in Chapter 18. However, we think there’s still a need for simple arrays — that is, copies of objects in regular patterns — so we explain how to do those (and it’s just slightly different from what it used to be) in this chapter. The icons and input locations for the four Array commands shown in Table 11-1 run the new associative array commands that we cover in Chapter 18; we include them here because they’re still grouped with the other Modify commands in the Ribbon, the menu, and the toolbars.

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218 Part II: Let There Be Lines

Table 11-1 (continued)

No matter how you start an editing command, in almost all cases AutoCAD prompts you for object selection, points, distances, and options in the command window. Read the prompts during every step of the command, especially when you’re figuring out how to use a new editing command. When all else fails, read the command prompt!

AutoCAD’s Dynamic Input system displays command options at the crosshairs. When you see a Dynamic Input tooltip with a down-arrow icon, press the down-arrow key to display the command options. You then can use the mouse to select an option (see Figure 11-1). Pressing the up-arrow key displays previous input.

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