Mark Middlebrook: AutoCAD 2005 for Dummies

If you saw the impressive and apparently random piles of stuff cluttering my desk while I was writing this book, you’d wonder how I could organize a chapter, never mind an entire book. Nevertheless, I hope you’ll find that the book reflects some concerted thought about how to present AutoCAD in a way that’s both easy-to-dip-into and smoothly-flowing-from-beginning-to-end.

The organization of this book into parts — collections of related chapters — is one of the most important, uh, parts of this book. You really can get to know AutoCAD one piece at a time, and each part represents a group of closely related topics. The order of parts also says something about priority; yes, you have my permission to ignore the stuff in later parts until you’ve mastered most of the stuff in the early ones. This kind of building-block approach can be especially valuable in a program as powerful as AutoCAD. The following sections describe the parts that the book breaks down into.

Need to know your way around the AutoCAD screen? Why does AutoCAD even exist, anyway? What are all the different AutoCAD-based products that Autodesk sells, and should you be using one of them — for example, AutoCAD LT — instead of AutoCAD? Is everything so slooow because it’s supposed to be slow, or do I have too wimpy a machine to use this wonder of modern-day computing? And why am I doing this stuff in the first place?

Part I answers all these questions — and more. This part also includes what may seem like a great deal of excruciating detail about setting up a new drawing in AutoCAD. But what’s even more excruciating is to do your setup work incorrectly and then feel as though AutoCAD is fighting you every step of the way. With a little drawing setup work done in advance, it won’t.

In this part, it’s time for some essential concepts, including object properties and CAD precision techniques. I know that you’re raring to make some drawings, but if you don’t get a handle on this stuff early on, you’ll be terminally (or is that monitor-ally? ) confused when you try to draw and edit objects. If you want to make drawings that look good, plot good, and are good, read this stuff!

After the concepts preamble, the bulk of this part covers the trio of activities that you’ll probably spend most of your time in AutoCAD doing: drawing objects, editing them, and zooming and panning to see them better on the screen. These are the things that you do in order to create the geometry — that is, the CAD representations of the objects in the real world that you’re designing. By the end of Part II, you should be pretty good at geometry, even if your ninth-grade math teacher told you otherwise.

CAD drawings do not live on lines alone — most of them require quite a bit of text, dimensioning, and hatching in order to make the design intent clear to the poor chump who has to build your amazing creation. (Whoever said “a picture is worth a thousand words” must not have counted up the number of words on the average architectural drawing!) This part shows you how to add these essential features to your drawings.

After you’ve gussied up your drawing with text, dimensions, and hatching, you’ll probably want to create a snapshot of it to show off to your client, contractor, or grandma. Normal people call this process “printing,” but CAD people call it “plotting.” Whatever you decide to call it, I’ll show you how to do it.

A good CAD user, like a good kindergartner, plays well with others. AutoCAD encourages this behavior with a host of drawing-and data-sharing features. Blocks, external reference files, and raster images encourage reuse of parts of drawings, entire drawings, and bitmap image files. The new sheet sets feature in AutoCAD 2005 opens up new possibilities for creating, organizing, and publishing the many drawings that compose a typical CAD project. CAD standards serve as the table manners of the CAD production process — they define and regulate how people create drawings so that sharing can be more productive and predictable. AutoCAD’s Internet features enable sharing of drawings well beyond your hard disk and local network.

The drawing and data sharing features in AutoCAD takes you way beyond old-style, pencil-and-paper design and drafting. After you’ve discovered how to apply the techniques in this part, you’ll be well on your way to full CADnerd-hood (you may want to warn your family beforehand).

This part contains guidelines that minimize your chances of really messing up drawings (your own or others’), and techniques for swapping drawings with other people and accessing them from other computer programs. There’s a lot of meat packed into these two chapters — juicy tidbits from years of drafting, experimentation, and fist-shaking at things that don’t work right — not to mention years of compulsive list-making. I hope that you find these lists help you get on the right track quickly and stay there.

This icon tells you that herein lies a pointed insight that can save you time and trouble as you use AutoCAD. In many cases, tip paragraphs act as a funnel on AutoCAD’s impressive but sometimes overwhelming flexibility: After telling you all the ways that you can do something, I tell you the way that you should do it in most cases.

The Technical Stuff icon points out places where delving a little more deeply into AutoCAD’s inner workings or pointing out something that most people don’t need to know about most of the time. These paragraphs definitely are not required reading the first time through, so if you come to one of them at a time when you’ve reached your techie detail threshold, feel free to skip over them.

This icon tells you how to stay out of trouble when living a little close to the edge. Failure to heed its message may have unpleasant consequences for you and your drawing — or maybe for both of you.

There’s a lot to remember when you’re using AutoCAD, so I’ve remembered to remind you about some those things that you should be remembering. These paragraphs usually refer to a crucial point earlier in the chapter or in a previous chapter. So if you’re reading sequentially, a remember paragraph serves as a friendly reminder. If you’re not reading sequentially, this kind of paragraph may help you realize that you need to review a central concept or technique before proceeding.

This icon points to new stuff in AutoCAD 2005. It’s mostly designed for those of you who are somewhat familiar with a previous version of AutoCAD and want to be alerted to what’s new in this version. New AutoCAD users starting out their CAD working lives with AutoCAD 2005 will find this stuff interesting, too — especially when they can show off their new book-learnin’ to the grizzled AutoCAD veterans in the office who don’t yet know about all the cool, new features.