the sheet set, and avoid thwarting these automatic annotations by drawing separate text or symbols for the same purpose.
Explode with Care
The eXplode command makes it easy to explode polylines (Chapter 5), dimensions (Chapter 10), hatches (Chapter 11), and block inserts (Chapter 13) into their constituent objects. The only problem is that someone probably grouped those objects together for a reason. So until you understand that reason and know why it no longer applies, leave the dynamite alone.
Don’t Cram Your Geometry
It’s okay to cram for a geometry test, but don’t cram geometry, dimensions, text, or anything (and everything) else into your drawings. A real temptation exists to put a lot of stuff into every square inch of your drawing, using AutoCAD’s flexible panning and zooming capabilities to really work over all the available space. If you succumb to this temptation, you’ll discover that editing is more difficult and adding more information may be impossible! In addition, the result probably will be harder to read. Instead of cramming stuff onto the sheet, use white (empty) space to surround areas of dense geometry. Put details on separate sheets. Attach a page of notes instead of putting a ton of text onto your drawing. Managing a reasonable number of drawings with less on each one is easier than having two or three densely packed sheets crammed with every bit of geometry and annotation needed for the project.
Freeze Instead of Erase
It’s common to start with an existing drawing from another discipline when you want to add, say, an electrical system to a floor plan. But if you remove the landscaping around a building because you don’t need it for the wiring, you may cause a great deal of rework when the landscaping information is needed again. And what if the person who did the landscaping work has, in the meantime, decided to leaf? (Sorry…) Unless you know that objects are no longer needed, use the AutoCAD Freeze or Off layer setting to make objects on those layers invisible without obliterating them. These settings are in the Layer Properties Manager dialog box, as described in Chapter 4.
Use CAD Standards
Become knowledgeable about CAD standards in your industry and company, and take advantage of any standardized resources and approaches that are available to you. (See Chapter 15 for suggestions.) By following standards consistently, you can apply your creativity, expertise, and energy to the interesting parts of the job at hand, not to arguing about which hatching patterns to use. And if you find that things are a mess in your company because no one else pays much attention to industry standards, well, knowing those standards makes you very employable as well.
Save and Back Up Drawings Regularly
As with all computer documents that you work on, get in the habit of saving your current AutoCAD drawing regularly. I recommend every 10 minutes or so. Each time you save, AutoCAD writes the current state of the drawing to the
AutoCAD also includes an automatic drawing save feature. It’s useful as a secondary backup save, but you shouldn’t rely on it exclusively. AutoCAD creates automatic save files with inscrutable names like Drawing1_1_1_1478.SV$ and puts them in the folder specified by the Automatic Save File Location setting on the File tab of the Options dialog box. Save your drawing and save yourself the pain of lost work and the hassle of trying to locate the right automatic save file. If you find yourself in the unfortunate position of needing an automatic save file, move the SV$ files file from the automatic save folder to another folder. Rename the files from SV$ to DWG, open them in AutoCAD, and look for the one that corresponds to the drawing you’re trying to recover. Note that AutoCAD deletes the SV$ file after you close the drawing, so it’s usually useful only after a software or computer crash.
Backing up your data is prudent advice for any important work that you do on a computer, but it’s doubly prudent for CAD drawings. A set of CAD drawings is a lot harder and more time consuming to re-create than most other computer documents. Unless you’re willing to lose more than a day’s worth of work, develop a plan of daily backups onto tape, CD-RW (CD ReWritable) discs, or another high-capacity medium.
Don’t be lulled into complacency by the increasing reliability of hard disks. Although hard disk failure is increasingly rare, it still happens, and if it happens to you
Chapter 18
Ten Ways to Swap Drawing Data with Other People and Programs
At various times, you probably need to transfer information from one kind of document to another. You even may have taken the CAD plunge because you want to import AutoCAD drawing data into your word processing or other documents. If so, this chapter is for you. It covers exchanging AutoCAD drawing data with other programs — what works, what doesn’t, and how to do it. I also tell you when to give up and reach for the scissors and glue.
This chapter frequently mentions vector and raster graphics file formats:
? A vector format stores graphics as collections of geometrical objects (such as lines, polygons, and text). Vector graphics are good for high geometrical precision and for stretching or squeezing images to different sizes. These two characteristics make vector formats good for CAD.
? A raster format stores graphics as a series of dots, or
