AutoCAD® 2012 FOR DUMMIES®

A Simple Plot

Okay, so you believe me. You know that you're not going to master AutoCAD plotting in five minutes. That doesn't change the fact that your boss, employee, wife, husband, construction foreman, or 11-year-old daughter wants a quick check plot of your drawing.

Plotting success in 16 steps

Here's the quick, cut-to-the-chase procedure for plotting a simple drawing — a mere 16 steps! This procedure assumes that you plot in model space — that is, that clicking the Model button on the status bar shows you the drawing in a way that you want to plot. (I cover plotting paper space layout tabs in the section “Plotting the Layout of the Land,” later in this chapter.) This procedure doesn't deal with controlling plotted lineweights — see the “Plotting Lineweights and Colors” section, later in this chapter, for those details. It should, however, result in a piece of paper that bears some resemblance to what AutoCAD displays on your computer monitor.

Follow these steps to make a simple, not-to-scale, monochrome (black-and-white) plot of a drawing:

1. Open the drawing in AutoCAD.
2. Click Model (not the MODEL/PAPER button) on the status bar to ensure that you're plotting the model space contents. If you have the Model and Layout tabs displayed, rather than the status-bar buttons, click the Model tab.

   I explain model space and paper space in Chapters 4 and 5, and how to plot paper space ...