Beginning AutoCAD - Looking at a drawing
When you first start to draw, your biggest problem will be, how do I navigate through the drawing? How do I see what I want to? Can I see something bigger? Can I make this smaller so that I can see other stuff not on my screen? These are all common questions I hear all the time from beginners, so if these are some of the questions on your mind, you're not alone.
First, remember that the drawing environment is unlimited. It's a universe unto itself. You can make something infinitely small or monumentally huge. AutoCAD doesn't care. You can also make a huge object that when looked closely at will start to reveal more information the closer you get to it.
To do what you want to do you need to use several different functions. All of these functions will work in 2D, but necessarily in 3D. Today we will simply look at 2D.
Your commands include Zoom, Pan, RTZoom, RTPan, and -Pan. There are also DDView and View commands that work like Memory+ keys on a calculator - they remember exact locations that you were looking at.
Zoom and RTZoom allow you to get closer or farther away from the object being looked at. Many beginners often confuse zooming with scaling an object. It is very important to understand that you are absolutely not changing the object that you are looking at. For example, look at your keyboard. Notice how big the keys look from where you are sitting. Now get up and walk across the room and look at the keyboard. Notice that the keys look smaller. This is because they take up more of your field of vision when you are closer and your brain interprets this as being bigger. In reality we know that the keyboard is not changing size, but rather our perception of the object is changing. The same holds true in AutoCAD. As you get closer to an object it appears larger on the screen taking up more of your field of view. As you get farther away from it, it appears smaller; details are lost and blurred together. The object however is not physically changing size. Similarly Pan, -pan and RTPan are not moving a drawing in space, but rather you are changing your vantage point - the place from which you are looking. You can pan left, right, up or down and scroll throughout the drawing.
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