AutoCAD® 2012 FOR DUMMIES®

A Template for Success

When you start in either the Drafting & Annotation workspace (as I do throughout this book) or the old AutoCAD Classic workspace, AutoCAD creates a new, blank drawing configured for 2D drafting. Depending on where you live (your country, not your street address!) and the dominant system of measure used there, AutoCAD will base this new drawing on one of two default drawing templates: acad.dwt for the imperial system of measure, as used in the United States, or acadiso.dwt for the metric system, used throughout the rest of the galaxy. (In AutoCAD LT, the two default templates are acadlt.dwt and acadltiso.dwt.) When you explicitly create a new drawing from within AutoCAD, the Select Template dialog box, as shown in Figure 4-3, appears by default so you can choose a template on which to base your new drawing.

Figure 4-3: A toolbox of templates.

You may be familiar with Microsoft Word or Excel template files, and AutoCAD drawing templates work pretty much the same way — because Autodesk stole the idea from them (encouraged, of course, by Microsoft).

A template is simply a drawing whose name ends in the letters DWT, which you use as the starting point for another drawing. When you create a new drawing from a template, AutoCAD makes a copy of the template file and opens the copy in a new drawing editor window. The first time you save the file, you're prompted for ...