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Beginners Guide to ACAD - lesson 1

© Jonathan Jonas

In light of all the new toys coming out of the AutoDesk Headquarters, I thought I'd take the next few articles and get back to the basics. I have quite a few people that I deal with that use AutoCAD other day, as they need it, and don't have time to invest in learning the some of the basics and miss out on important information. This week I'll be looking at the most basic of commands that people use to draw with.

Before we begin - the most import thing I can tell you before you draw anything is that you will always draw every single line in it's full size. If you are drawing a 2x4 stud, you will draw it as an object that is measured in ACAD as actually 2" x 4" (or 1.5x3.5 depending on you idea of a nominally sized 2x4). If you are drawing a house that is 100' long, then you will be able to do a distance between those two points and they will be exactly 100' apart, not 100' 1 1/64", but exact. Nor will you figure out in your head that for a 50' building at 1/8" that the building will be drawn 6.25" long - THIS IS WRONG. Make the computer do what it's good at - calculate. Make it do the math of scaling your drawing. You work in actual sizes and dimensions!

When you first sit down with AutoCAD and start to draft, you see lots of icons, a dialog box, a command line area and your pull down menus. At the dialog box you have several choices. You can open an existing file or you can open a Drawing Template. The templates are new to r14 and allow you to have a drawing environment that is preset to a small degree. As a more experienced user you may not like using the templates and prefer to create your own setup, but for the beginner it is a place to at least start. You can also simply bypass the dialog box and jump right in and start to draft. You might want to request that files being sent to you from your clients or consultants have all 3D elements removed, have nothing in Tilemode 0, nothing in PaperSpace, and saved as an r12 file. This will remove many annoyances to beginners such as mlines, splines, mtext, etc. You don't need to know what these are today, but you should really make a point of learning about them in the near future to allow better compatibility with others.

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