The underscore is an Autodesk programmers’ trick that enables non-English versions of AutoCAD to understand the English command names that are embedded in the menus.
• AutoCAD sometimes puts an apostrophe in front of the command name and any underscore (for example, ‘_ZOOM instead of ZOOM). The apostrophe indicates a
? Leave the command line in the default configuration initially. The command line area, like most other parts of the AutoCAD screen, is resizable and relocateable. The default location (docked at the bottom of the AutoCAD screen) and size (three lines deep) work well for most people. Resist the temptation to mess with the command line area’s appearance — at least until you’re comfortable with how to use the command line.
? Right-click in the command line area for options. If you right-click in the command line area, you’ll see a menu with some useful choices, including Recent Commands — the last six commands that you ran.
? Press the up-and down-arrow keys to cycle through the stack of commands that you’ve typed recently. This is another handy way to recall and rerun a command. Press the left-and right-arrow keys to edit the command line text that you’ve typed or recalled.
After all these screen hors d’oeuvres, you’re probably getting hungry for the main course — the AutoCAD drawing area. This is where you do your drawing, of course. In the course of creating drawings, you click points to specify locations and distances, click objects to select them for editing, and zoom and pan to get a better view of what you’re working on.
The back and forth needed to get AutoCAD to draw and complete a line is a great example of AutoCAD’s power — and its power to confuse new users. It’s kind of like a wine that tastes a bit harsh initially, but that ages better than something more immediately drinkable.
In other programs, if you want to draw a line, you just draw it. In AutoCAD, you have to press Enter one extra time when you’re done just to tell AutoCAD you really are finished drawing.
But the fact that the Line command remains active after you draw the first line segment makes it much faster to draw complicated, multisegment lines, which is a common activity in a complex drawing.
This is just one example of how AutoCAD favors ease of use for power users doing complex drawings over ease of mastery for beginners, who frequently forget to hit Enter that extra time to close out a command.
Most of this book shows you how to interact with the drawing area, but you should know a few things up front.
One of the initially disorienting things about AutoCAD is that finished drawings can be composed of objects drawn in different
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When you click the Model tab in the drawing area, you see pure, unadulterated model space, as shown in Figure 2-7. When you click one of the paper space layout tabs (Layout1 or Layout2, unless someone has renamed or added to them), you see a paper space layout, as shown in Figure 2-8. A completed layout usually includes one or more
As I describe in the “Looking for Mr. Status Bar” section in this chapter, after you’ve clicked one of the layout tabs, the status bar’s MODEL/PAPER button moves the cursor between model and paper space while remaining in the particular layout. (As shown in Figures 2-7 and 2-8, the orientation icon at the lower-left corner of the AutoCAD drawing area changes between an X-Y axis for model space and a drafting triangle for paper space as an additional reminder of which space the cursor currently resides in.) Chapter 3 describes the consequences of changing the MODEL/PAPER setting and advises you on how to use it.
Figure 2-7: Our model lounging around in model space.
Figure 2-8: Freshly laid out in paper space.
This back-and-forth with the MODEL/PAPER button or double-clicking is necessary only when you’re drawing things while viewing one of the paper space layouts. In practice, you probably won’t encounter that situation very often. Instead, you’ll do most of your drawing on the Model tab and, after you’ve set up a paper space layout, click its layout tab only when you want to plot.
Here a few other things to know about the AutoCAD drawing area:
? Efficient, confident use of AutoCAD requires that you continually glance from the drawing area to the command line area (to see those all-important prompts!) and then back up to the drawing area. This sequence is not a natural reflex for most people. Get in the habit of looking at the command line after each action that you take, whether picking something on a toolbar, on a menu, or in the drawing area.
? Clicking at random in the drawing area is not quite as harmless in AutoCAD as it is in many other Windows programs. When you click in the AutoCAD drawing area, you’re almost always performing some action — usually specifying a point or selecting objects for editing. Feel free to experiment, but look at the command line after each click. If you get confused, press the Esc key a couple of times to clear the current operation and return to the naked command prompt.
? In most cases, you can right-click in the drawing area to display a menu with some options for the current situation.
A Palette-Cleanser
In AutoCAD 2005, two features called Properties and DesignCenter, a toolbar-like interface called Tool Palettes, and the new Sheet Set Manager appear in spiffy modeless dialog boxes, or
? Properties and DesignCenter: Used to control object properties and named objects (layers, blocks, and so on), respectively. Chapter 4 shows you how.
? Tool Palettes: Resembles a stack of painter’s palettes, except that each palette holds
? Sheet Set Manager: Provides tools for managing all of
