AutoCAD For Dummies

You’re one step away from creating crystal-clear computer-aided drafts in AutoCAD Ever started an AutoCAD project, only to give up when you couldn’t quite get the hang of it? Or do you have a project coming up that would really benefit from a few meticulously created drawings? Then you need the latest edition of AutoCAD For Dummies, the world’s bestselling retail book about the wildly popular program. With coverage of all the important updates to AutoCAD released since 2019, this book walks you through the very basics of pixels, vectors, lines, text, and more, before moving on to more advanced step-by-step tutorials on three-dimensional drawings and models. Already know the fundamentals? Then skip right to the part you need! From blocks to parametrics, it’s all right here at your fingertips. You’ll also find: In-depth explanations of how to create and store your drawings on the web Stepwise instructions on creating your very first AutoCAD drawing, from product installation and project creation to the final touches An exploration of system variables you can tweak to get the best performance from AutoCAD Perfect for the AutoCAD newbie just trying to find their way around the interface for the first time, AutoCAD For Dummies is also a must-read reference for the experienced user looking to get acquainted with the program’s latest features and essential drawing tips. Grab a copy today!

Table of Contents:
Introduction 1 About This Book 2 Foolish Assumptions 3 Conventions Used in This Book 3 Using the command line 3 Using aliases 4 Icons Used in This Book 4 Beyond the Book 5 Where to Go from Here 6 Part 1: Getting Started With Autocad 7 Chapter 1: Introducing AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT 9 Launching AutoCAD 10 Drawing in AutoCAD 11 Understanding Pixels and Vectors 14 The Cartesian Coordinate System 15 Chapter 2: The Grand Tour of AutoCAD 17 Looking at AutoCAD’s Drawing Screen 18 For your information 21 Making choices from the Application menu 22 Unraveling the Ribbon 24 Getting with the Program 27 Looking for Mr Status Bar 28 Using Dynamic Input 28 Let your fingers do the talking: The command line 29 The key(board) to AutoCAD success 30 Keeping tabs on palettes 34 Down the main stretch: The drawing area 34 Fun with F1 35 Chapter 3: A Lap around the CAD Track 37 A Simple Setup 38 Drawing a (Base) Plate 43 Taking a Closer Look with Zoom and Pan 52 Modifying to Make It Merrier 53 Crossing your hatches 53 Now that’s a stretch 54 Following the Plot 57 Plotting the drawing 57 Today’s layer forecast: Freezing 60 Chapter 4: Setup for Success 61 A Setup Roadmap 62 Choosing your units 62 Weighing up your scales 65 Thinking about paper 68 Defending your border 69 A Template for Success 69 Making the Most of Model Space 72 Setting your units 72 Making the drawing area snap-py (and grid-dy) 73 Setting linetype, text, and dimension scales 76 Entering drawing properties 77 Making Templates Your Own 77 Chapter 5: A Zoom with a View 83 Panning and Zooming with Glass and Hand 84 The wheel deal 84 Navigating a drawing 85 Zoom, Zoom, Zoom 87 A View by Any Other Name 88 Degenerating and Regenerating 91 Part 2: Let There Be Lines 93 Chapter 6: Along the Straight and Narrow 95 Drawing for Success 96 Introducing the Straight-Line Drawing Commands 97 Drawing Lines and Polylines 98 Toeing the line 99 Connecting the lines with polyline 100 Squaring Off with Rectangles 105 Choosing Sides with POLygon 106 Chapter 7: Dangerous Curves Ahead 109 Throwing Curves 109 Going Full Circle 110 Arc-y-ology 112 Solar Ellipses 114 Splines: Sketchy, Sinuous Curves 115 Donuts: Circles with a Difference 117 Revision Clouds on the Horizon 118 Scoring Points 120 Chapter 8: Preciseliness Is Next to CADliness 123 Controlling Precision 124 Understanding the AutoCAD Coordinate Systems 127 Keyboard capers: Coordinate input 128 Introducing user coordinate systems 128 Drawing by numbers 129 Grabbing an Object and Making It Snappy 131 Grabbing points with object snap overrides 132 Snap goes the cursor 134 Running with object snaps 135 Other Practical Precision Procedures 137 Chapter 9: Manage Your Properties 141 Using Properties with Objects 142 Using the ByLayer approach 142 Changing properties 144 Working with Layers 146 Accumulating properties 148 Creating new layers 149 Manipulating layers 156 Scaling an object’s linetype 158 Using Named Objects 159 Using AutoCAD DesignCenter 161 Chapter 10: Grabbing Onto Object Selection 163 Commanding and Selecting 164 Command-first editing 164 Selection-first editing 164 Direct-object editing 164 Choosing an editing style 165 Selecting Objects 166 One-by-one selection 167 Selection boxes left and right 167 Tying up object selection 169 Perfecting Selecting 170 AutoCAD Groupies 173 Object Selection: Now You See It 173 Chapter 11: Edit for Credit 175 Assembling Your AutoCAD Toolkit 175 The Big Three: Move, COpy, and Stretch 178 Base points and displacements 178 Move 180 COpy 181 Copy between drawings 182 Stretch 183 More Manipulations 186 Mirror, mirror on the monitor 186 ROtate 188 SCale 189 -ARray 190 Offset 192 Slicing, Dicing, and Splicing 194 TRim and EXtend 194 BReak 196 Fillet, CHAmfer, and BLEND 197 Join 200 Other editing commands 202 Getting a Grip 203 When Editing Goes Bad 206 Dare to Compare 207 Chapter 12: Planning for Paper 209 Setting Up a Layout in Paper Space 212 The layout two-step 212 Put it on my tabs 215 Any Old Viewport in a Layout 216 Up and down the detail viewport scales 216 Keeping track of where you’re at 218 Practice Makes Perfect 219 Clever Paper Space Tricks 219 Part 3: If Drawings Could Talk 221 Chapter 13: Text with Character 223 Getting Ready to Write 224 Creating Simply Stylish Text 226 Font follies 227 Get in style 228 Taking Your Text to New Heights 230 Plotted text height 230 Calculating non-annotative AutoCAD text height 231 Entering Text 232 Using the Same Old Line 232 Saying More in Multiline Text 235 Making it with mText 235 mText dons a mask 238 Insert Field 239 Doing a number on your mText lists 239 Line up in columns — now! 242 Modifying mText 243 Turning On Annotative Objects 244 Gather Round the Tables 247 Tables have style, too 247 Creating and editing tables 249 Take Me to Your Leader 251 Electing a leader 251 Multi options for multileaders 254 Chapter 14: Entering New Dimensions 255 Adding Dimensions to a Drawing 256 Dimensioning the Legacy Way 257 A Field Guide to Dimensions 260 Self-centered 263 Quick, dimension! 263 Where, oh where, do my dimensions go? 264 The Latest Styles in Dimensioning 266 Creating dimension styles 269 Adjusting style settings 271 Changing styles 274 Scaling Dimensions for Output 275 Editing Dimensions 278 Editing dimension geometry 278 Editing dimension text 280 Controlling and editing dimension associativity 281 And the Correct Layer Is 282 Chapter 15: Down the Hatch! 283 Creating Hatches 284 Hatching Its Own Layer 287 Using the Hatches Tab 287 Scaling Hatches 290 Scaling the easy way 291 Annotative versus non-annotative 292 Pushing the Boundaries of Hatch 292 Adding style 293 Hatches from scratch 294 Editing Hatch Objects 296 Chapter 16: The Plot Thickens 299 You Say “Printing,” I Say “Plotting” 300 The Plot Quickens 300 Plotting success in 16 steps 300 Getting with the system 304 Configuring your printer 305 Preview one, two 307 Instead of fit, scale it 307 Plotting the Layout of the Land 309 Plotting Lineweights and Colors 311 Plotting with style 311 Plotting through thick and thin 316 Plotting in color 320 It’s a (Page) Setup! 321 Continuing the Plot Dialog 322 The Plot Sickens 325 Part 4: Advancing With Autocad 327 Chapter 17: The ABCs of Blocks 329 Rocking with Blocks 330 Creating Block Definitions 332 Inserting Blocks 336 Attributes: Fill-in-the-Blank Blocks 340 Creating attribute definitions 341 Defining blocks that contain attribute definitions 343 Inserting blocks that contain attribute definitions 343 Editing attribute values 344 Extracting data 344 Exploding Blocks 345 Purging Unused Block Definitions 345 Chapter 18: Everything from Arrays to Xrefs 347 Arraying Associatively 349 Comparing the old and new ARray commands 350 Hip, hip, array! 351 Associatively editing 356 Going External 358 Becoming attached to your xrefs 360 Layer-palooza 362 Editing an external reference file 362 Forging an xref path 363 Managing xrefs 365 Blocks, Xrefs, and Drawing Organization 366 Mastering the Raster 367 Attaching a raster image 369 Maintaining your image 370 You Say PDF; I Say DWF 371 Theme and Variations: Dynamic Blocks 373 Now you see it 373 Lights! Parameters! Actions! 377 Manipulating dynamic blocks 379 Chapter 19: Call the Parametrics! 381 Maintaining Design Intent 382 Defining terms 384 Forget about drawing with precision! 385 Constrain yourself 386 Understanding Geometric Constraints 386 Applying a little more constraint 388 Using inferred constraints 393 You AutoConstrain yourself! 394 Understanding Dimensional Constraints 395 Practice a little constraint 396 Making your drawing even smarter 398 Using Parameters Manager 400 Dimensions or constraints? Have it both ways! 403 Lunchtime! 406 Chapter 20: Drawing on the Internet 407 The Internet and AutoCAD: An Overview 407 You send me 408 Prepare it with eTransmit 408 Rapid eTransmit 409 Increasing cloudiness 411 Bad reception? 411 Help from Reference Manager 412 The Drawing Protection Racket 413 Outgoing! 414 Autodesk weather forecast: Increasing cloud 414 Your head planted firmly in the cloud 416 AutoCAD Web and Mobile 417 Part 5: On A 3d Spree 419 Chapter 21: It’s a 3D World After All 421 The 3.5 Kinds of 3D Digital Models 422 Tools of the 3D Trade 424 Warp speed ahead 425 Entering the third dimension 425 Untying the Ribbon and opening some palettes 426 Modeling from Above 428 Using 3D coordinate input 428 Using point filters 429 Object snaps and object snap tracking 429 Changing Work Planes 430 Displaying the UCS icon 430 Adjusting the UCS 431 Orbit à go-go 437 Taking a spin around the cube 438 Grabbing the SteeringWheels 440 Visualizing 3D Objects 440 On a Render Bender 442 Chapter 22: From Drawings to Models 443 Is 3D for Me? 444 Getting Your 3D Bearings 445 Creating a better 3D template 445 Seeing the world from new viewpoints 450 From Drawing to Modeling in 3D 451 Drawing basic 3D objects 452 Gaining a solid foundation 453 Drawing solid primitives 454 Adding the Third Dimension to 2D Objects 455 Adding thickness to a 2D object 455 Extruding open and closed objects 455 Pressing and pulling closed boundaries 456 Lofting open and closed objects 456 Sweeping open and closed objects along a path 457 Revolving open or closed objects around an axis 458 Modifying 3D Objects 458 Selecting subobjects 459 Working with gizmos 459 More 3D variants of 2D commands 460 Editing solids 461 Chapter 23: It’s Showtime! 465 Get the 2D Out of Here! 466 A different point of view 470 Additional 3D tricks 471 AutoCAD’s top model 472 Visualizing the Digital World 474 Adding Lights 475 Default lighting 475 User-defined lights 476 Sunlight 479 Creating and Applying Materials 479 Defining a Background 482 Rendering a 3D Model 484 Chapter 24: AutoCAD Plays Well with Others 485 Get Out of Here! 485 Making a splash with PNG 486 PDF to the rescue 488 What the DWF? 489 3D print 490 But wait! There’s more! 491 Open Up and Let Me In! 491 Editing other drawing file formats 491 PDF editing 491 Translation, Please! 494 The Importance of Being DWG 495 Part 6: The Part of Tens 497 Chapter 25: Ten AutoCAD Resources 499 Autodesk Discussion Groups 499 Autodesk’s Own Blogs 499 Autodesk University 500 Autodesk Channel on YouTube 500 World Wide (CAD) Web 500 Your Local Authorized Training Center 501 Your Local User Group 501 Autodesk User Groups International 502 Books 502 Autodesk Feedback Community 502 Chapter 26: Ten System Variables to Make Your AutoCAD Life Easier 503 Aperture 504 Dimassoc 505 Menubar 505 Mirrtext 505 Osnapz 506 Pickbox 506 Rememberfolders 507 Rollovertips And Tooltips 507 Taskbar 508 Visretain 508 And the Bonus Round 508 Chapter 27: Ten AutoCAD Secrets 511 Sheet Sets 511 Custom Tool Palettes 512 Ribbon Customization 512 Toolsets 512 Programming Languages 512 Vertical Versions 513 Language Packs 513 Multiple Projects or Clients 514 Data Extraction and Linking 514 Untying the Ribbon and Drawings 514 Index 515 

About the Author :
Ralph Grabowski is editor of upFront.eZine, a weekly e-newsletter that reports on the business of computer-aided design. He is the author of more than 240 books and e-books on CAD and other topics, and his renowned WorldCAD Access industry blog is widely respected in the industry.