A Zoom with a View - AutoCAD 2012 - page 255

Zoom and Pan with Glass and Hand
Moving your viewpoint in to get a closer view of your drawing data is called zooming in;
moving your viewpoint back to get a more expansive view is called zooming out. Moving
your viewpoint to another part of your drawing without zooming in or out is called pan-
ning.
Changing your viewing position lets you do detailed work on tiny objects and then zoom
out and move around rooms, houses, or neighborhoods from an Olympian perspective.
Early versions of AutoCAD included a sample drawing of our solar system, drawn to
scale with kilometers as units, which proved this. If you zoomed all the way out, you
could see Pluto's orbit (yes, kids, Pluto was a planet back then), and you could zoom in
close enough to Earth's moon to read the inscription on the plaque left by the Apollo 11
astronauts!
Panning means changing your viewing position without changing the magnification of
the view. If you zoom in enough that some of your drawing no longer shows up on-
screen, you're going to want to pan around — move left, right, up, and down in your
drawing — without zooming in and out. AutoCAD makes panning easy with scroll bars
and realtime panning. And in case you're wondering what realtime panning might be (as
opposed to pretendtime panning, maybe?), it simply means you can see the objects
moving around the screen as you drag the mouse up and down or back and forth. (Of
course, it's your viewpoint that's moving, not the objects!)
Both panning and zooming change the view — the current location and magnification of
the AutoCAD depiction of your drawing. Each time you zoom or pan, you establish a
new view. You can give a name to a specific view to make returning to that view easy, as I
demonstrate in the section “A View by Any Other Name . . . ,” later in this chapter.
You'll get a better sense of panning and zooming around a drawing if you actually have a
drawing to look at. Draw some objects on the screen, open one of your own existing
drawings, or launch one of AutoCAD's sample drawings. (If you haven't done so already,
you can download the sample files from www.autodesk.com/autocad-samples ; the
AutoCAD LT sample files are also online now, at www.autodesk.com/autocadlt-samples .)
Navigating your drawing
You may think that AutoCAD is all about drawing, and maybe, occasionally, even about
erasing. In that case, it may surprise you to learn that two of the most frequently used
commands in all of AutoCAD are PAN and ZOOM. These commands and a few others can
be found on an interface component called the Navigation bar.