AutoCAD® 2012 FOR DUMMIES®

A Simple Setup

In this chapter, I walk you through creating, editing, viewing, and plotting a new drawing — refer to Figure 3-1 if you want to get an idea of what the finished product looks like. You can follow these steps using either imperial or metric units; I show metric values in brackets after the imperial ones, like this: Type 1.5 [38] and press Enter.

You can find the files I use in this sequence of steps at this book's companion web site. Go to www.dummies.com/go/autocad2012 and download afd03.zip. The zip file contains imperial and metric versions of the base plate exercise at various stages — the Read Me file on the downloads tab has a detailed description of the files.

Pay attention to AutoCAD's feedback. Glance at the messages AutoCAD sends after each step via the command window at the bottom of the screen or the Dynamic Input tooltip near the crosshairs so that you begin to get familiar with the names of commands and their options. (If you don't see any messages next to the crosshairs as you use the program, click the Dynamic Input button on the status bar — if your status bar displays button icons rather than text labels, click the button with the tooltip that reads “Dynamic Input.”) As I describe in Chapter 4, drawing setup isn't a simple task in AutoCAD. Nonetheless, ...