AutoCAD 2005 for Dummies

the attachment information.

In addition, raster files can increase the time that AutoCAD takes to generate plots (and the plot file sizes) dramatically. Before you settle on using large raster files in your AutoCAD drawing, do some testing on zooming, editing, and plotting.

Chapter 14 Sheet Sets without Regrets

In This Chapter

? Understanding resource drawings, views, and sheets

? Creating and using sheet sets

? Adding drawings and assembling views

? Adding a sheet list table

A typical AutoCAD project can include dozens of drawings, scores of sheets, lots of layouts, copious cross- drawing references, and more than a few people working on those components at once. How do you create, manage, update, plot, and generally keep a handle on all that stuff without going crazy? The new sheets sets feature in AutoCAD 2005 is Autodesk’s response to this challenge.

Without sheet sets, you must manage project drawings “manually” — that is, you have to make sure that all the project’s drawings get created, get numbered and named correctly, and have up-to-date title block information. You also have to ensure that cross-sheet references are accurate (for example, when a plan includes references to details on other sheets). When the time comes to send drawings to clients or consultants, you must ensure that you include all the sheets and that all of them are up-to-date. For a large project with many drawings, these can be daunting tasks. It’s easy to end up with missing sheets or sheets that contain obsolete title block or cross-reference information, especially when you add or renumber sheets later in a project.

Sheet sets comprise a new palette, a group of completely new commands, and a few updated existing features. Together these things make possible a new approach to managing all the drawings for a project. Sheet sets provide a single interface that lists all your sheets, their numbers, and their names. (AutoCAD stores this information, along with the relationships among the sheets, in a DST file.) You can add and renumber sheets easily. You can create cross-sheet references that update automatically after you renumber sheets, and you can create a sheet list on your title sheet that updates automatically after you change sheet numbers or titles. When you’re ready to send or plot drawings, a sheet set enables AutoCAD to locate and gather all the required files.

Because the sheet sets approach is brand new, it remains to be seen how quickly (or whether) AutoCAD users adopt it. My prediction is that companies with well-managed CAD production staffs that work on larger projects requiring lots of sheets will find sheet sets compelling and move to adopt them quickly. Companies whose projects require only a few drawing sheets or whose AutoCAD users tend to do their own thing with little central organization probably will continue to deal with sheets as discreet, unconnected DWG files.

  Sheet sets rely on other relatively sophisticated AutoCAD features, so make sure that you’re familiar with the following before you delve into this chapter:

? Paper space layouts (Chapter 3)

? Named views (Chapter 7)

? Tables and text fields (Chapter 9)

? Blocks and attributes (Chapter 13)

? External references (Chapter 13)

Understanding external references and layouts is especially important because these features are central to the way that the Sheet Set Manager creates and organizes sheets.

Taming Sheet Sets

Your passport to the brave new world of sheet sets comes in the form of the Sheet Set Manager palette, shown in Figure 14-1. You use this palette for most sheet set operations. To toggle the palette on or off, click the Sheet Set Manager button (which looks like a roll of drawings) on the Standard toolbar or press Ctrl+4. If you choose to leave the palette on most of the time, you may want to turn on its auto-hide setting so that it gets out of the way automatically when you’re not using it — refer to Chapter 2 for instructions.

Figure 14-1: The Sheet Set Manager palette.

The Sheet Set Manager palette’s three tabs indicate the three major types of objects you use to create and manage sheet sets:

? Resource Drawings contain subcomponents such as individual plans, details, and elevations that you use to build your sheets. Resource drawings usually contain geometry and annotations in model space only. Resource drawings usually don’t include title blocks or paper space layouts. You must add DWG files to the Resource Drawings tab before you can create Views and add them to Sheets.

? Views are areas of resource drawings that you place on a sheet. A sheet set view can be the entire resource drawing or just a portion of it that you’ve defined, using the AutoCAD named views feature. (Chapter 7 explains named views and shows how to create them.)

  You don’t have to use named views in order to take advantage of sheet sets, but you may use them to assemble different areas of a resource drawing onto one or more sheets. For example, if you draw a large plan that needs to be broken up onto several sheets in order to plot at a legible scale, you define a named view for each area of the plan and place each view on a separate sheet.

? Sheets are paper space layouts within drawing files. (Chapter 3 describes layouts and shows how to create them.) Each sheet corresponds to one sheet in the sheet set. With the sheet set methodology, AutoCAD attaches resource drawings as xrefs into sheet drawings and creates paper space viewports on a layout in order to show the desired area of the resource drawing — either a named view or the entire drawing. You use the Sheet Set Manager to tell AutoCAD which resource drawings and views to put on which sheets. AutoCAD then does the attach-xref-and-make-viewport procedure automatically.

AutoCAD stores the settings for all this stuff — the names of files and configuration data that control how the sheet set features work with those files — in a DST file. Each project has its own DST file, and multiple AutoCAD users can use one project’s DST file at the same time.

Using an Existing Sheet Set

The quickest way to get started with sheet sets is to use one that someone else — such as a CAD manager in your office — has set up. You also can experiment with Autodesk’s sheet set samples, located under C:Program FilesAutoCAD NeoSampleSheet Sets.

To open an existing sheet set configuration, do one of the following:

? Click the menu at the top of the Sheet Set Manager palette and choose Open. AutoCAD displays a file dialog box, in which you can navigate to the appropriate folder, select the sheet set data file, and click the Open button.