AutoCAD® 2009 For Dummies®

Chapter 4. Setup for Success

In This Chapter

• Developing a setup strategy

• Starting a new drawing

• Setting up model space

• Creating and using drawing templates

Surprisingly, drawing setup is one of the trickier aspects of using AutoCAD. It's an easy thing to do incompletely or incorrectly, and AutoCAD 2009 doesn't provide a simple, one-click tool to help you do all of it right. And yet, drawing setup is a crucial thing to get right. Setup steps that you omit or don't do right may come back to bite you later.

Sloppy setup really becomes apparent when you try to plot (print) your drawing. Things that seemed more or less okay as you zoomed around on the screen are suddenly the wrong size or scale on paper. And nothing brands someone as a naive AutoCAD wannabe as quickly as the inability to plot a drawing at the right size and scale. Chapter 5 covers plotting procedures, but the information in this chapter is a necessary prerequisite to successful plotting and sheet setup. If you don't get this stuff right, there's a good chance you'll find that ...the plot sickens.

This chapter describes the decisions you need to make before you set up a new drawing, shows the steps for doing a complete and correct setup, and demonstrates how to save setup settings for reuse.

Warning

Don't assume that you can just create a new blank DWG file and start drawing things. Do read this chapter before you get too deep into the later chapters in this book. Many AutoCAD drawing commands and concepts depend on proper drawing ...