Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
Discovering the drawing area
Using online help
AutoCAD 2012 is a full-fledged and thoroughly up-to-date member of the Windows world,
but if your last kick at the software was AutoCAD 2008, or you're using Windows XP, or
you've yet to kick the tires of the Microsoft Office 2007 suite, you may not recognize
much in AutoCAD's newest release. But the title bar says “AutoCAD 2012,” so you must
be in the right place!
Like the rest of the topic, this chapter is written for someone who has used other Win-
dows programs but has little or no experience with AutoCAD. If you
are
experienced
with recent releases of AutoCAD, some of this chapter may be old hat (even if it does
look
different). Here and throughout the rest of the topic, I show you how to do things
using AutoCAD's implementation of Microsoft's Fluent User Interface (or FUI for short).
In the “Going for that classic look” sidebar later in this chapter, I show you how to make
the new version look a lot like an old one.
By default, AutoCAD 2012 opens in the Drafting & Annotation workspace, and will con-
tinue to do so until you make another workspace current. (I explain workspaces in the
section “And They're Off: AutoCAD's Opening Screens,” later in this chapter.) If you've
been away from AutoCAD for a while, right now you may be asking yourself, “Where are
my toolbars? Where is my menu?” Unlike older Windows programs, AutoCAD 2012
sports just one toolbar — the Quick Access Toolbar, on the application title bar, right
next to the Application button (known informally as the “Big Red A”) — and doesn't
show a menu bar in this environment. Instead, the Drafting & Annotation workspace dis-
plays two major interface items:
The Application Menu:
Clicking the Application button at the top-left corner of the
AutoCAD window opens the AutoCAD 2012 Application Menu. The Application
Menu presents file-related commands only; here you can create new drawings,
open existing drawings, save files, or print your masterpieces.
The Ribbon:
The Ribbon replaces the menus, toolbars, many of the palettes, and
the dashboard of earlier releases. Whereas the Application Menu focuses on file
management, the Ribbon is where you find commands to create and modify draw-
ing objects. The Autodesk programmers made a best guess at a task-based ap-
proach to drafting and organized the old interface items into panels of related
tools.
I discuss both of these items in more detail in the following sections. For the dyed-in-the-
wool traditionalists, you can reset the AutoCAD 2012 environment so it looks pretty
