80 Part I: AutoCAD 101
Figure 3-14: Your column is hatched.
8.Click the tiny arrow below the Zoom button on the Navigation bar and choose Zoom All from the menu.
AutoCAD zooms out so that the entire area defined by the limits is visible.
9.Press Ctrl+S to save the drawing.
After some drawing and editing, you may wonder how you’re supposed to know when to turn off or on the various status bar modes (Snap, Grid, Ortho, Object Snap, and so on). You’ll start to get an instinctive sense of when each mode is useful and when it gets in the way. If one of the modes gets in the way — or you find you need a mode — you can click the buttons at any time during editing and drawing commands. In subsequent chapters of this book, we give you some more specific guidelines.
Drawing afd03e-i.dwg [afd03e-m.dwg] available in the afd03.zip download is the completed base plate. How does it compare with your version?
Following the Plot
Looking at drawings on a computer screen and exchanging them with others via e-mail or websites is all well and good, but sooner or later, someone — maybe you! — will want to see a printed version. Printing drawings — or plotting, as CAD geeks like to call it — is much more complicated than
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Chapter 3: A Lap around the CAD Track 81
printing a word-processing document or a spreadsheet. That’s because you have to worry about things such as drawing scale, lineweights, title blocks, and weird paper sizes. We go deeper into plotting in Chapter 16, but this section gives you an abbreviated procedure that can help you generate a recognizable printed drawing.
The following steps show you how to plot the model space portion of the drawing. As Chapter 5 describes, AutoCAD includes a sophisticated feature — paper space layouts — for creating arrangements of your drawing that you plot.
These arrangements usually include a title block. Because we promised you a gentle tour of AutoCAD drafting functions, we save the discussion of paper space layout and title blocks for a bit later. When you’re ready for the whole plotting enchilada, turn to Chapter 5 for information about how to set up paper space layouts; see Chapter 16 for full plotting instructions.
Follow these steps to plot a drawing:
1.Click the Plot button on the Quick Access Toolbar.
The Quick Access Toolbar is at the left end of the program’s title bar, just to the right of the Application button. The Plot icon looks like an ordinary desktop printer.
AutoCAD opens the Plot-Model dialog box, with the title bar showing what you’re plotting (model space, in this case).
2.Click the More Options button (in the bottom-right corner of the dialog box, next to the Help button).
The Plot dialog box reveals additional settings, as shown in Figure 3-15.
3.In the Printer/Plotter area, select a printer from the Name dropdown list.
If in doubt, the Default Windows System Printer usually works.
4.In the Paper Size area, use the drop-down list to select a paper size that’s loaded in your printer or plotter.
Anything Letter size (81⁄2 x 11 inches) [A4 (210 x 297mm)] or larger works for this example.
5.In the Plot Area, select Limits from the drop-down list.
This is the entire drawing area, which you specified when you set up the drawing in the section “A Simple Setup,” earlier in this chapter.
6.In the Plot Offset area, select the Center the Plot check box.
Alternatively, you can specify offsets of 0 or other amounts in order to position the plot at a specific location on the paper.
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82 Part I: AutoCAD 101
Figure 3-15: The Plot dialog box with the More Options area visible.
7.In the Plot Scale area, deselect the Fit to Paper check box and choose 1:10 from the Scale drop-down list.
1:10 is the scale used to set up the drawing (which we explain in the section “A Simple Setup,” earlier in this chapter). No prizes for guessing the metric equivalent of 1:10!
8.In the Plot Style Table (Pen Assignments) area, click the drop-down list and choose monochrome.ctb.
The monochrome.ctb plot style table ensures that all your lines appear solid black, rather than as different colors or weird shades of gray. See Chapter 16 for information about plot style tables and monochrome and color plotting.
9.Click Yes when a question dialog box appears, asking Assign This Plot Style Table to All Layouts?
You can leave the remaining settings at their default values (refer to Figure 3-15).
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Chapter 3: A Lap around the CAD Track 83
Some printers let you print closer to the edges of the sheet than do others. To find out the actual printable area of your own printer, move the mouse pointer to the postage-stamp-size partial preview in the middle of the Plot dialog box and pause. A tooltip appears, listing the Paper Size and Printable Area for the printer and the paper size that you selected.
10. Click the Preview button.
If the plot scale you entered in the Plot dialog box is out of sync with the drawing’s annotation scale, a Plot Scale Confirm dialog box appears, advising you that the annotation scale isn’t equal to the plot scale. This drawing doesn’t contain any text or dimensions, and we didn’t bother making the hatch annotative, so it’s fine to click Continue and generate the plot.
Annotative scaling controls the printed size of text, dimensions, hatching, and other types of annotation objects at plot time — as long as the drawing’s annotation scale matches the plot scale. We explain annotative objects in Chapter 13.
The Plot dialog box disappears temporarily, and AutoCAD shows how the plot will look on paper. In addition, AutoCAD prompts you on the status bar as follows:
Press pick button and drag vertically to zoom, ESC or ENTER to exit, or right-click to display shortcut menu.
11.Right-click in the preview area and choose Exit.
12.If the preview doesn’t look right, adjust the settings in the Plot dialog box and look at the preview again until it looks right.
13.Click OK.
The Plot Scale Confirm dialog box pops up again. You may be tempted to click Always Continue Under These Conditions, but we recommend against that until you’ve gained a little familiarity with annotative objects.
The Plot dialog box closes. AutoCAD generates the plot and sends it to the printer. After generating the plot, AutoCAD displays a Plot and Publish Job Complete balloon notification from the right end of the status bar. (A Click to View Plot and Publish Details link displays more information about the plot job.)
14.Click the X (Close) button in the Plot and Publish Job Complete balloon notification.
The balloon notification disappears.
If you’re not happy with the lineweights of the lines on your plot at this point, fear not. You can use the lineweights feature (Chapter 6) or plot styles (Chapter 16) to control plotted lineweights.
15. Press Ctrl+S to save the drawing.
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84 Part I: AutoCAD 101
Congratulations! You successfully executed your first plot in AutoCAD. Chapter 16 tells you more — much more — about AutoCAD’s highly flexible (but occasionally perplexing) plotting system.
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4
Setup for Success
In This Chapter
Developing a setup strategy
Starting new drawings
Setting up model space
Creating and using drawing templates
Surprisingly, drawing setup is one of the trickier aspects of using AutoCAD. It’s an easy thing to do incompletely or incorrectly, and
AutoCAD 2013 doesn’t provide a simple, one-click tool to help you do all of it right. And yet, drawing setup is a crucial thing to get right. Setup steps that you omit or don’t do right may come back to bite you later. The good news is that if you do things properly, you need to do them only once.
The really good news is that AutoCAD is extremely versatile and flexible. As a general rule, the easier something is
to use, the less able you are to bend, fold, staple, and mutilate to get it to work in some perverse way that’s unique to you and your needs.
Sloppy setup really becomes apparent when you try to plot (print) your drawing. Things that seemed more or less okay as you zoomed around on the screen are suddenly the wrong size or scale on paper. And nothing brands someone as a naïve AutoCAD wannabe as quickly as the inability to plot
a drawing at the right size and scale. Chapter 5 covers plotting setup procedures, but the information in this chapter is a necessary prerequisite to successful plotting and sheet setup. If you don’t get this stuff right, there’s a good chance you’ll find that . . . the plot sickens.
This chapter describes the decisions you need to make before you set up a new drawing, shows the steps for doing a complete and correct setup, and demonstrates how to save setup settings for reuse.
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