AutoCAD® 2009 & AutoCAD LT® 2009 All-in-One Desk Reference for Dummies®

Chapter 3. Managing Views

When you draw things in AutoCAD, you draw them at full size. If you're drawing the cross section of a 2 × 4 (or a 38 × 89 for our metrically inclined friends), you can look at it full size, so that the screen width is the same as the width of the actual piece of lumber. If your monitor is big enough, you can even view a 2 × 12 (38 × 286) on your screen at its real size. Sooner rather than later, though, it becomes uneconomical to keep getting a bigger monitor as you need to draw bigger things.

Luckily, the ZOOM command lets you increase or decrease the magnification of your drawing objects through a number of options, which I discuss in this chapter. In addition to zooming in and out of drawings, you should know some other display commands — PAN, NAVSWHEEL, VIEW, AND NAVSMOTION — because they'll come in handy as you navigate your drawings.

PAN lets you move around in the drawing without changing the magnification. The NAVSWHEEL command combines the ZOOM and PAN commands into a single user interface that will remind you of a steering wheel in a car. The VIEW command displays a dialog box in which you can save and restore named views. NAVSMOTION command allows you to visually access named views quickly from the status bar without using a dialog box.

Table 3-1 lists AutoCAD's 2D display commands in alphabetical order, together with how they can be accessed from the user interface and general descriptions of what they do.

Table 3.1. AutoCAD's 2D Display Commands ...