Setting Up a Drawing - AutoCAD 2011 and AutoCAD LT 2011: No Experience Required - page 73

CHAPtER 3
Setting up a Drawing
In Chapter 2, “Learning Basic Commands to Get Started,” we explored
the default drawing area that is set up when you open AutoCAD and start a
new drawing. Using an assortment of common commands, you drew a box
within the drawing area. If you drew the additional diagram offered as a
supplemental exercise, the drawing area was set up the same way.
From this point forward, I'll provide the metric equivalents in parentheses
for readers who do not work in Imperial units, the standard for architectural
design in the United States. Throughout the majority of this topic, you'll
be developing drawings for a cabin with outside wall dimensions of 28 ′× 18 ′
(8550 mm × 5490 mm). Whether or not you work in architecture, the tools
you'll use and the skills you'll learn in this exercise will translate into nearly
any discipline, enabling you to draw objects of any shape or size. In this
chapter, you'll learn how to set up the drawing area to lay out the floor plan
for a building of a specific size. The Decimal units with which you have been
drawing until now will be changed to feet and inches, and the drawing area
will be transformed so that it can represent an area large enough to display
the floor plan of the cabin you'll be drawing.
As you learn to set up your drawing, you'll also begin exploring ways to
navigate your drawing more easily, draw lines at a specified incremental dis-
tance (such as the nearest foot), and more. Finally, you'll save this drawing
to a special folder on your hard drive. At the end of the chapter is a general
summary of the various kinds of units that AutoCAD supports.
Setting up drawing units
Using autoCaD's grid
Zooming in and out of a drawing
Naming and saving a file