AutoCAD® 2012 FOR DUMMIES®

A Setup Roadmap

You have to set up AutoCAD correctly, partly because AutoCAD is so flexible and partly because, well, you're doing CAD — computer-aided drafting (or design). The computer can't aid your drafting (or design) if you don't clue it in on things like system of measure, drawing scale, paper size, and units. In this context, the following facts help explain why AutoCAD drawing setup is important:

• Electronic paper: The most important thing you can do to make using AutoCAD fun is to work on a correctly-set-up drawing so that your screen acts like paper, only smarter. When drawing on real paper, you constantly have to translate between units on the paper and the real-life units of the object you're drawing. But when drawing in AutoCAD's smarter paper, you draw directly in real-life units — feet and inches, millimeters, or whatever you typically use on your projects. AutoCAD can then calculate distances and dimensions for you and add them to the drawing. You can make the mouse pointer jump directly to preset intervals on-screen, and a visible, resizable grid gives you a better sense of the scale of your drawing. However, this smart-paper function works well only if you tell AutoCAD some crucial parameters for your specific drawing. AutoCAD can't really do its job until you tell it how to work.
• Dead-trees paper: Creating a great drawing on-screen that doesn't fit well on paper is all too easy. After you finish creating your drawing on the smart paper that AutoCAD provides ...