AutoCAD® 2009 & AutoCAD LT® 2009 Bible

Chapter 8. Viewing Your Drawing

Often you may wish that you could zoom in to see a particular part of a drawing more closely or move the display in a certain direction to reveal an area that is hidden. You may also want to save a view so that you can return to it at some other time. In this chapter, you read about controlling the display of your drawing to meet all your drawing needs and increase your productivity. This chapter covers viewing a 2D drawing.

Note

If you're using AutoCAD, this entire chapter assumes that you're using the 2D Drafting & Annotation workspace and the 2D Wireframe visual style. To check, choose 2D Drafting & Annotation workspace from the Workspace Switching pop-up list on the status bar. To set the visual style to 2D Wireframe, choose Menu Browser

Regenerating and Redrawing the Display

AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT are vector programs, which means that they store information about objects in your drawing in terms of coordinates and equations. To display your drawing on your computer screen, the programs convert the vector information to pixels. Occasionally, you may need to redisplay the objects on your screen. One way is to recalculate the entire drawing, in a process called regenerating (the REGEN command). Another way is to quickly access a virtual screen from your computer's memory; this is called redrawing(the REDRAW command). Keep in mind that redrawing is quicker ...