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Even if you’re lucky or perseverant enough to get a well-rounded set of CAD standards in your office, that may not be the end of it. CAD-savvy people from different companies who collaborate on projects often want to minimize the pain of inconsistency during drawing exchange. Although each company may have its own CAD standards house in order, there’s no way that all those standards will be the same. Thus, one or more companies (often the lead consultant) may impose a set of
The result of this confusing muddle of industry practices, company CAD standards, and project-specific CAD standards is that you find yourself switching among different standards as you work on different projects. Before you start making drawings, find out whether any particular CAD standards apply. It’s a lot easier to start off conforming with those standards than to fix nonconforming drawings later.
What Needs to Be Standardized?
If you are in a company or on a project without any CAD standards, put together at least a minimal set of guidelines. First, impose some consistency on
A spreadsheet or word processing program is great for documenting your CAD standards decisions as they firm up. Many CAD standards components work best as tabular lists of layers, colors, and so on. (See Tables 15-1 and 15-2 in this chapter for examples.) Use the cells in a spreadsheet or the tables feature in a word processor to organize your CAD standards documentation.
Before you start, make sure that you’re familiar with managing properties (Chapter 4) and plot styles (Chapter 12). You need a good understanding to make intelligent decisions about your plotting and layer standards. (If you want to make
If you plan to use color-dependent plot styles (most people do), develop a color-to-lineweight plotting chart like Table 15-1. If you choose the more logical but lonelier named plot styles approach, make a similar chart, with plot style names instead of color in the first column. (See Chapter 12 for information about color-dependent and named plot styles.) After you complete a plotting chart, create a plot style table (CBT file for color-dependent plot styles or STB file for named plot styles), as in Chapter 12.
Table 15-1 Sample Color-to-Lineweight Plotting Chart
| AutoCAD Color | Plotted Lineweight |
|---|---|
| 1 (red) | 0.15 mm |
| 2 (yellow) | 0.20 mm |
| 3 (green) | 0.25 mm |
| 4 (cyan) | 0.30 mm |
| 5 (blue) | 0.35 mm |
| 6 (magenta) | 0.40 mm |
| 7 (white/black) | 0.50 mm |
| 8 (dark gray) | 0.10 mm |
| 9 (light gray) | 0.70 mm |
Your life will be easier — and your plotting chart will be shorter — if you limit yourself to a small portion of the 255 colors in the AutoCAD Color Index (ACI). The first nine colors work well for many people.
If your work requires
After you work out your plotting conventions, you’re ready to develop a chart of layers. A chart of layers takes more thought and work, and you’ll probably revise it more frequently than the plotting chart. Find a typical drawing from your office or industry and identify the things you’ll draw — such as walls, text, dimensions, and hatching. Then decide how you’d like to parse those objects onto different layers (see Chapter 4). Here are some guidelines:
? Objects that you want to plot with different lineweights go on different layers. Assign each layer an appropriate color, based on how you want the objects to appear on the screen and on plots. If you’re using object lineweights (Chapter 4) or named plot styles (Chapter 12), include a column for these settings in your chart. In all cases, let the objects inherit these properties from the layer.
? Objects whose visibility you want to control separately go on different layers. Turn off or freeze a layer in order to make the objects on that layer, and only the objects on that layer, disappear temporarily.
? Objects that represent significantly different kinds of things in the real world go on different
