AutoCAD For Dummies. Ralph Grabowski

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СКАЧАТЬ the Plot Offset section, select the Center the Plot check box.Alternatively, you can specify offsets of 0 or other amounts to position the plot at a specific location on the paper.

      6 In the Plot Scale section, deselect the Fit to Paper check box and choose 1:10 from the Scale drop-down list.You receive no prize for guessing the metric equivalent of 1:10.

      7 In the Plot Style Table (Pen Assignments) section, click the drop-down list and choose monochrome.ctb.The monochrome.ctb plot style table ensures that all lines appear in 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.

      8 Click Yes when the question dialog box appears, asking Assign This Plot Style Table to All Layouts?You can leave the remaining settings at their default values as shown in Figure 3-10.

      9 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, the Plot Scale Confirm dialog box appears, advising you that the annotation scale isn’t equal to the plot scale. This drawing doesn’t contain text or dimensions, and you didn’t make the hatch annotative, so you can click Continue to generate the plot.FIGURE 3-10: The Plot dialog box, with the More Options area visible. 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. I explain annotative objects in Chapters 13 and 14.The Plot dialog box disappears temporarily, and AutoCAD shows how the plot will look on paper.

      10 Right-click in the preview area and choose Exit.

      11 If the preview doesn’t look the way you want, adjust the settings in the Plot dialog box and click the Preview button again. Continue to adjust the settings until the plot looks right.

      12 Click OK.The Plot Scale Confirm dialog box pops up again. You may be tempted to click Always Continue Under These Conditions, but I recommend against it until you’re more familiar with annotative objects.The Plot dialog box closes. AutoCAD generates the plot and sends it to the printer. AutoCAD then displays a Plot and Publish Job Complete balloon notification from the right end of the status bar. A link labeled Click to View Plot and Publish Details displays more information about the plot job.

      13 Click the Close (X) 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 (see Chapter 9) or plot styles (see Chapter 16) to control plotted lineweights.

      14 Press Ctrl+S to save the drawing.You successfully executed your first plot in AutoCAD. Chapter 16 tells you much more about AutoCAD’s highly flexible but occasionally perplexing plotting system.

      Today’s layer forecast: Freezing

      Oops — the nutty engineer is back. Now the requirement is a shop drawing of the base plate alone with its four holes but no column and no nuts. No problem. The solution is to freeze (hide) the layers with the unwanted objects.

      Expand the Layer drop-down list from the Layers tab and click the 0 layer name to make it the current one, because the current layer (which had been Hatch) can never be frozen.

      Expand the Layer drop-down again, but this time click the sunshine icons beside the Column, Hatch, and Nuts layers. As you do so, each sunshine turns to a snowflake and everything on the corresponding layer disappears. Frozen layers cannot be seen, edited, or plotted. Click a snowflake, and its layer thaws to sunshine. I discuss layers in Chapter 9.

      Congratulations! You have now used the few commands that will account for the majority of your long and prosperous AutoCAD career!

Chapter 4

      Setup for Success

      IN THIS CHAPTER

      

Developing a setup strategy

      

Starting new drawings

      

Setting up model space

      

Creating and using drawing templates

      The good news is that AutoCAD is very powerful and versatile. And the not-quite-so-good news is that it’s extremely powerful and versatile. This means that you can set it up to work in almost any segment of nearly any industry or application, just about anywhere in the world. AutoCAD is used for mechanical design, electrical and electronic circuit schematics, hydraulics, buildings, bridges, theatre stage layouts, cloth-cutting layouts in the clothing industry, designing big floppy clown shoes, keeping track of season’s ticket holders’ seats in a hockey arena, and so on. In short, everything from autos to zoos.

      Because most companies and schools will already have set things up to suit their particular standards, all you need to do — and in fact, must do — is to use their template files. If you’re working alone, however, you should read on to learn how to create template files of your own.

      In the long (or even medium or short) term, AutoCAD is much easier to use when you start from a drawing that’s already set up properly. There can be quite a few things to set up, but if you do things properly, you need to do it only once.

Sloppy setup really becomes apparent when you try to plot (note that CAD geeks say “Plot” whereas normal people say “Print”) your drawing. Things that seemed more or less okay as you zoomed around on the screen are suddenly the wrong size or don’t look right on paper. Chapter 16 covers plotting, but the information in this chapter is a necessary prerequisite to successful plotting and sheet setup. If you don’t get this stuff correct, 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.

      

Don’t assume that you can just create a new blank DWG file and start drawing things. Do read this chapter before you wander too far away from this book. Many AutoCAD drawing commands and concepts depend on proper drawing setup, so you’ll have a much easier time drawing and editing things after you do your setup homework.

      Then, after you digest the detailed drawing setup procedures described in this and the following chapters, use the СКАЧАТЬ