12
A Zoom with a View
In This Chapter
Zooming and panning
Naming and restoring views
Zooming and panning in paper space layouts
Regenerating the display
One of AutoCAD’s advantages over manual drawing is its ability to show you different views of your drawing. You can zoom in close, zoom out
to a great distance, and pan around. In fact, not only can you zoom and pan in your drawing, but in most kinds of drawings, you must also do it frequently to be able to draw and edit effectively.
Technical drawings are jam-packed with lines, text, and dimensions. Zooming and panning frequently enables you to see
the details better, draw more confidently (because you can see what you’re doing), and edit more quickly (because object selection is easier when there aren’t
a zillion objects on the screen). This chapter covers AutoCAD’s most useful display control features.
Zoom and Pan with Glass and Hand
Moving your viewpoint in to get a closer view of your drawing data is called zooming in; moving your viewpoint back to get a more expansive view is called zooming
out. Moving your viewpoint to another part of your drawing without zooming in or out is called panning.
Changing your viewing position lets you do detailed work on tiny objects and then zoom out and move around rooms, houses, or neighborhoods from an Olympian perspective. Early versions of AutoCAD included a sample drawing
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244 Part II: Let There Be Lines
of our solar system, drawn to scale with kilometers as units, which proved this. If you zoomed all the way out, you could see Pluto’s orbit (yes, kids, Pluto was a planet back then), and you could zoom in close enough to Earth’s moon to read the inscription on the plaque left by the Apollo 11 astronauts!
In fact, AutoCAD’s zoom range is far more impressive than this. AutoCAD can draw a circle with a radius of 1098 units, but the radius of the known (so far) universe is “only” about 8.2 x 1021 miles. At the other end of the range, it can draw a circle with a radius of 10-98 units, versus the Lorentz or “standard” radius of an electron of about 1.1 x 10-12 inches.
Panning means changing your viewing position without changing the magnification of the view. If you zoom in enough that some of your drawing no longer shows up onscreen, you’re going to want to pan around — move left, right, up, and down in your drawing — without zooming in and out. AutoCAD makes panning easy with scroll bars and realtime panning. And in case you’re wondering what realtime panning might be (as opposed to pretendtime panning, maybe?), it simply means you can see the objects moving around the screen as you drag the mouse up and down or back and forth. (Of course, it’s your viewpoint that’s moving, not the objects!)
Both panning and zooming change the view — the current location and magnification of the AutoCAD depiction of your drawing. Each time you zoom or pan, you establish a new view. You can give a name to a specific view to make returning to that view easy, as we demonstrate in the section “A View by Any Other Name . . . ,” later in this chapter.
You’ll get a better sense of panning and zooming around a drawing if you actually have a drawing to look at. Draw some objects on the screen, open one of your own existing drawings, or launch one of AutoCAD’s sample drawings. (If you haven’t done so already, you can download the sample files from
www.autodesk.com/autocad-samples; the AutoCAD LT sample files are also online at www.autodesk.com/autocadlt-samples.)
The wheel deal
Later in this chapter, we cover AutoCAD’s various commands and options for panning and zooming in more detail. On the other hand, if you have a wheel mouse, you’ll rarely need to use other methods, especially when working in 2D drawings. If you don’t have a wheel mouse, you should run out and buy one because the slight cost will be more than offset by your increased productivity. The following three actions will usually suffice for almost all your panning and zooming needs.
To zoom in and out: Roll the scroll wheel forward and backward.
To pan: Many people don’t know that the scroll wheel is also a button. To pan, hold down the scroll wheel as you move the mouse.
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To zoom to the extents of your drawing: Double-click the scroll wheel. This is particularly useful when you don’t heed the warnings in Chapter 11 about when to press Enter during a Move or Copy.
Navigating your drawing
You may think that AutoCAD is all about drawing, and maybe, occasionally, even about erasing. In that case, it may surprise you to learn that two of the most frequently used commands in all of AutoCAD are PAN and ZOOM. These commands and a few others can be found on an interface component called
the Navigation bar.
The Navigation bar is linked by default to another interface component named the ViewCube. (AutoCAD LT users get the Navigation bar, but not the ViewCube.) Figure 12-1 shows the upper-right corner of the AutoCAD window with the ViewCube and Navigation bar in their default locations.
ViewCube
Pan
Navigation Zoom split button bar
Navigation bar menu
Figure 12-1: Belly up to the Navigation bar.
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We fill you in on the ViewCube in Chapter 21, since it’s a more useful tool in three dimensions than in two. We also cover the SteeringWheels and ShowMotion commands (the latter isn’t present in AutoCAD LT) in Part V of this book.
Controlling your cube
Apart from the big chunk of screen space the ViewCube and Navigation bar occupy, the cube itself has some disconcerting behaviors. If you click the Home button, for example, you automatically switch to a preset 3D isometric view — not that helpful if you’re doing a 2D drawing. Worse yet, any of the side views just show you the edge of your 2D drawing.
We think the cube-bar combo is worthwhile when you’re doing 3D modeling, but more intrusive than useful for 2D drafting. Luckily, AutoCAD offers quite a bit of control over both the ViewCube and the Navigation bar. You can turn off the navigation buttons you don’t use, and you can turn off the ViewCube itself, either for the drawing session or permanently.
To turn off navigation buttons: Open the Navigation bar’s menu by clicking the down arrow at its bottom-right corner (refer to Figure 12-1) and deselecting SteeringWheels, Orbit, and ShowMotion.
To turn off the ViewCube in the current viewport: Go to the View tab’s Windows panel, click User Interface, and deselect ViewCube. Reverse the procedure to turn it on again.
To turn off the ViewCube permanently: Open the Options dialog box, and select the 3D Modeling tab. In the Display Tools in Viewport area, deselect 2D Wireframe Visual Style and All Other Visual Styles under Display the ViewCube.
In addition to the Navigation bar, the Navigate and Navigate 2D panels of the Ribbon’s View tab contains a Pan button and a drop-down set of Zoom tool buttons (in our opinion, not a very convenient location for such frequently used commands!).
AutoCAD offers 11 different ways of zooming around in your drawing; a wheel mouse can fulfill most of your needs, but we explain the most important of the other methods in the next section. The following steps describe how to use AutoCAD’s Zoom and Pan Realtime feature, which is easy to operate and provides a lot of flexibility:
1.Click the lower part of the Zoom split button on the Navigation bar and choose Zoom Realtime from the menu.
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The Realtime option of the ZOOM command starts. The crosshairs change to a magnifying glass, and AutoCAD prompts you at the command line:
Specify corner of window, enter a scale factor (nX or nXP), or [All/Center/
Dynamic/Extents/Previous/Scale/Window/Object] <real time>:
Press ESC or ENTER to exit, or right-click to display shortcut menu.
2.Move the magnifying glass cursor near the middle of the screen, press and hold down the left mouse button, and drag the cursor up and down until the objects you want to see almost fill the screen.
Dragging up increases the zoom magnification, and dragging down decreases it.
3.Right-click in the drawing area and choose Pan from the menu that appears (as shown in Figure 12-2).
Figure 12-2: The Zoom/Pan Realtime right-click menu.
The magnifying glass cursor changes to a hand.
(Because AutoCAD LT doesn’t do 3D, there’s no 3D Orbit choice on LT’s right-click menu.)
4. Click and drag to pan the drawing in any direction.
You can use the right-click menu to toggle between Zoom and Pan as many times as you like. If you get lost in your drawing, choose Zoom Original or Zoom Extents to return to a more familiar view.
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