AutoCAD® 2012 FOR DUMMIES®

Managing Your Properties

All the objects that you draw in AutoCAD are like good Monopoly players: They own properties. In AutoCAD, these properties aren't physical things; they're an object's characteristics, such as layer, color, linetype, lineweight, transparency, and plot style. You use properties to communicate information about the characteristics of the objects you draw, such as the kinds of real-world objects they represent, their materials, their relative location in space, or their relative importance. In AutoCAD, you also use properties to organize objects for editing and plotting purposes.

You can view — and change — all properties of an object in the Properties palette, and many of them in Quick Properties palette. In Figure 6-1, the Properties palette at the left and the Quick Properties palette at the right show properties for the selected line object.

The Properties palette was joined in AutoCAD 2009 by its more streamlined little sibling, Quick Properties. When Quick Properties is toggled on in the status bar, selecting an object opens a floating palette that displays a customizable selection of that object's properties. (If your status bar buttons show text rather than icons, look for the QP button.)

Figure 6-1: Comprehensive or quick? Sometimes you need lots of ...