AutoCAD 2005 for Dummies

that the AutoCAD drawing area color is white when you run the command. (Choose Tools>Options>Display>Colors to change display colors.)

? If you need to convert drawings to a raster format other than BMP or TIF, the second option is to use the AutoCAD Raster File Format driver. This driver enables you to “plot” to a file with one of nine raster formats, including PCX, JPEG, and TIFF. Before you can use the Raster File Format driver, you must create a new plotter configuration: Choose File>Plotter Manager and then run the Add-A-Plotter wizard. After you create the Raster File Format driver configuration, you use the Plot dialog box as described in Chapter 12 to generate “plots” to raster files.

To go the other direction, raster image file into an AutoCAD drawing, use the IMage command, as described in Chapter 13.

Windows Clipboard

If you need to transfer lots of WMF or BMP figures, you can do it a bit more quickly with the Windows Clipboard, which bypasses the creation of WMF and BMP files on disk. Instead, Windows uses your computer’s memory to transfer the data. Choose Edit>Copy in the program from which you want to copy the data and Edit>Paste Special in the program to which you want to copy it. In the Paste Special dialog box, choose Picture to paste the image in WMF format or Bitmap to paste it in BMP format.

OLE

Microsoft Windows includes a data transfer feature, Object Linking and Embedding, or OLE. (In case you’re wondering, that’s “OLE” pronounced like the Spanish cheer, not like the Cockney way of saying hole.) Microsoft touts OLE as an all-purpose solution to the challenge of exchanging formatted data between any two Windows programs.

If you want to share data between two OLE-aware programs (and most Windows applications are OLE- aware), creating an embedded or linked document shouldn’t be much more complicated than cut and paste. That’s the theory.

Here’s how it works. In OLE lingo, the program that you’re taking the data from is the source. The program that receives the data is called the container. For example, if you want to place some word processing text from Microsoft Word into an AutoCAD drawing, Word is the source, and AutoCAD is the container.

In Word, you select the text that you want to put in the AutoCAD drawing and choose Edit>Copy to copy them to the Windows Clipboard. Then, you switch to AutoCAD and choose Edit>Paste Special. The Paste Special choice displays a dialog box containing the choices Paste and Paste Link. The Paste option creates a copy of the object from the source document and embeds the copied object into the container document. The Paste Link option links the new object in the container document to its source document so any changes to the source document are automatically reflected in the container document. In other words, if you link word processing text to an AutoCAD drawing, changes that you make later in the Word document get propagated to the AutoCAD drawing automatically. If you embed the same spreadsheet object in an AutoCAD drawing, changes that you later make to the text in Word aren’t reflected in the AutoCAD drawing.

Should you shout, “OLE!”?

Unfortunately, OLE is afflicted with several practical problems.

? Compound OLE documents can slow performance — a lot. If you plan to use OLE, you should have a fast computer with lots of memory — or lots of time on your hands.

? Supporting OLE well is a difficult programming job, and many applications, including AutoCAD, suffer from OLE design limitations and bugs. (For example, when you link or embed a word processing document, only the first page appears in AutoCAD.)

? Previous versions of AutoCAD exhibited more OLE problems than AutoCAD 2005. In particular, plotted OLE output often underwent creative but undesirable transformations. If you exchange drawings with users of earlier versions, what they see on the screen and plot may not match what you created.

AutoCAD 2005 includes a bevy of OLE improvements, which address some of the limitations:

? You can control text size more easily, via the MOLESCALE system variable and OLESCALE command.

? Editing of OLE objects with commands such as Move and CoPy is more consistent with editing of native AutoCAD objects.

? You can control the quality of plotted OLE objects with a setting on the Plot and Publish tab of the Options dialog box.

Even with the OLE improvements in AutoCAD 2005, you should consider carefully and test extensively before embedding or linking documents into drawings. If you want to play it safe, use the alternative methods described in this chapter, and save OLE for your next trip to Spain.

That’s how it’s supposed to work. In practice, the container application sometimes doesn’t display or print all the linked or embedded data correctly. See the “Should you shout, ‘OLE!’?” sidebar for details.

Screen Capture

If your goal is to show the entire AutoCAD program window, not just the drawing contained in it, create a screen capture. Most of the figures in this book are screen captures. You might use similar figures to put together a training manual or to show your mom all the cool software you use.

Windows includes a no-frills screen capture capability that is okay for an occasional screen capture. It works like this: 

1. Capture the whole screen or active window with one of these steps:

 • Press the Print Screen key to capture the entire Windows screen, including the desktop and taskbar.

 • Hold down the Alt key and press the Print Screen key to capture just the active program window (for example, AutoCAD).

Windows copies a bitmap image to the Windows Clipboard. 

2. Paste the bitmap image into another program. You have two options:

 • Paste into a paint program (such as the Paint program in Windows). Use that program to save a raster image as a BMP file format.

 • Paste the bitmap image directly into a document (such as a Word document or an AutoCAD drawing) without creating another file.

If you do lots of captures, a screen capture utility program makes the job faster and gives you more options. You can control the area of the screen that gets captured, save to different raster file formats with different monochrome, grayscale, and color options, and print screen captures. One good screen capture utility program is FullShot by Inbit, Inc. (www.inbit.com).

When you create screen captures, pay attention to resolution and colors:

? High screen resolutions (for example, above 1280?1024) can make your captures unreadable when they get compressed onto an 8??11-inch sheet of paper and printed on a low-resolution printer.

? Some colors don’t print in monochrome, and a black AutoCAD drawing area is overwhelmingly dark. For most of the screen captures in this book I used 1024?768 resolution, a white AutoCAD drawing area, and dark