AutoCAD® 2009 & AutoCAD LT® 2009 Bible

Chapter 9. Editing Your Drawing with Basic Tools

No drawing project is ever completed without changes. You make changes in a drawing for many reasons. Some editing processes are simply part of the drawing process, such as copying an object instead of drawing it a second time from scratch. Other types of editing involve making changes to many objects at once, such as moving an entire section of a drawing to make room for additional objects. You often also need to erase, move, rotate, and resize objects.

Editing a Drawing

Making changes to a drawing is called editing. In order to edit an object, you need to select it. AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT offer numerous techniques for selecting objects. In this chapter, I cover basic editing commands as well as most of the ways to select objects. The rest of the 2D editing commands, as well as additional selection and editing methods—grips, the Properties palette, selection filters, and groups—are covered in the next chapter.

Most of the editing commands are on the Home tab in the Modify panel. In most cases, you can do either one of the following:

• Start the command first and then select the objects to which the command applies.

• Select the objects first and then start the command.

The question of which comes first, the command or the object, is fully covered later in this chapter.

Note

Although you can use the editing tools that I describe in this chapter in a 3D environment, this chapter assumes that you are working in a 2D environment. (AutoCAD LT doesn't ...