AutoCAD 2005

About the Author

Mark Middlebrook used to be an engineer but gave it up when he discovered that he couldn’t handle a real job. He is now principal of Daedalus Consulting, an independent CAD and computer consulting company in Oakland, California. (In case you wondered, Daedalus was the guy in ancient Greek legend who built the labyrinth on Crete. Mark named his company after Daedalus before he realized that few of his clients would be able to pronounce it and even fewer spell it.) Mark is also a contributing editor for CADALYST magazine and Webmaster of markcad.com. When he’s not busy being a cad, Mark sells and writes about wine for Paul Marcus Wines in Oakland. He also teaches literature and philosophy classes at St. Mary’s College of California — hence “Daedalus.” AutoCAD 2005 For Dummies is his sixth book on AutoCAD.

Author’s Acknowledgments

Thanks first of all to Bud Smith, who initiated this book five editions ago, brought me in on it along the way, and eventually handed it over to me in toto. I hope that I prove as good a steward as he was a midwife (or is the gender-neutral term “midspouse”?). Terri Varveris again shepherded the pro­ject through the development process; her enthusiasm and infectious energy have helped make each new edition more than just an obligatory update. It was a genuine pleasure to work once again with Christine Berman, whose combination of patience, persistence, and care make her a model project editor. As always, Dave Byrnes carried out his duties as tech editor with skill and verve; his diligence saved me from a few bloopers, and his thoughtful suggestions helped make the book perceptibly better,

Introduction

It’s amazing to think that AutoCAD came into being over two decades ago, *C at a time when most people thought that personal computers weren’t capable of industrial-strength tasks like CAD. (The acronym stands for Computer-Aided Drafting, Computer-Aided Design, or both, depending on whom you talk to). It’s almost as amazing that, 20 years after its birth, AutoCAD remains the king of the microcomputer CAD hill by a tall margin. Many competing CAD programs have come to challenge AutoCAD, many have fallen, and a few are still around. One hears rumblings that the long-term future of CAD may belong to special-purpose, 3D-based software such as the Autodesk Inventor and Revit programs. Whether or not those rumblings amplify into a roar remains to be seen, but for the present and the near future anyway, AutoCAD is where the CAD action is.

In its evolution, AutoCAD has grown more complex, in part to keep up with the increasing complexity of the design and drafting processes that AutoCAD is intended to serve. It’s not enough just to draw nice-looking lines anymore. If you want to play CAD with the big boys and girls, you need to organize the objects you draw, their properties, and the files in which they reside in appropriate ways. You need to coordinate your CAD work with other people in your office who will be working on or making use of the same drawings. You need to be savvy about shipping drawings around via the Internet.

AutoCAD 2005 provides the tools for doing all these things, but it’s not always easy to figure out which hammer to pick up or which nail to bang on first. With this book, you have an excellent chance of creating a presentable, usable, printable, and sharable drawing on your first or second try without putting a T square through your computer screen in frustration.

What’s Not in This Book

Unlike many other For Dummies books, this one does tell you to consult the official software documentation sometimes. AutoCAD is just too big and com­plicated for a single book to attempt to describe it completely.

This book focuses on AutoCAD 2005, and also addresses its slightly less-capable, much-lower-cost sibling, AutoCAD LT 2005. (AutoCAD LT 2005 For Dummies, a version of this book especially for LT users, comes out several

months later than the regular book.) I do occasionally mention differences with previous versions, going back to the highly popular AutoCAD Release 14, so that everyone has some context and upgraders can more readily under­stand the differences. I also mention the important differences between full AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT, so that you’ll know what you — or your LT-using colleagues — are missing. This book does not cover the discipline-specific features in AutoCAD-based products such as AutoCAD Architectural Desktop, except for some general discussion in Chapter 1, but most of the information in this book applies to the general-purpose AutoCAD features in the AutoCAD 2005-based versions of those programs as well.
Who Are — and Aren’t — You?

AutoCAD has a large, loyal, and dedicated group of long-time users. This book is not for the sort of people who have been using AutoCAD for a decade, who plan their vacation time around Autodesk University, or who consider 1,000-page-plus technical tomes about AutoCAD as pleasure reading. This book is for people who want to get going quickly with AutoCAD, but who also know the importance of developing proper CAD techniques from the beginning.
However, you do need to have some idea of how to use your computer system before tackling AutoCAD — and this book. You need to have a com­puter system with AutoCAD or AutoCAD LT (preferably the 2004 version). A printer or plotter and a connection to the Internet will be big helps, too.

You also need to know how to use Windows to copy and delete files, create a folder, and find a file. You need to know how to use a mouse to select (high­light) or to choose (activate) commands, how to close a window, and how to minimize and maximize windows. Make sure that you’re familiar with the basics of your operating system before you start with AutoCAD.

How This Book Is Organized

If you saw the impressive and apparently random piles of stuff cluttering my desk while I was writing this book, you’d wonder how I could organize a chapter, never mind an entire book. Nevertheless, I hope you’ll find that the book reflects some concerted thought about how to present AutoCAD in a way that’s both easy-to-dip-into and smoothly-flowing-from-beginning-to-end.

The organization of this book into parts — collections of related chapters — is one of the most important, uh, parts of this book. You really can get to know AutoCAD one piece at a time, and each part represents a group of closely related topics. The order of parts also says something about priority; yes, you have my permission to ignore the stuff in later parts until you’ve mas­tered most of the stuff in the early ones. This kind of building-block approach can be especially valuable in a program as powerful as AutoCAD.

The following sections describe the parts that the book breaks down into.

Part I: AutoCAD 101

Need to know your way around the AutoCAD screen? Why does AutoCAD even exist, anyway? What are all the different AutoCAD-based products that Autodesk sells, and should you be using one of them — for example, AutoCAD LT — instead of AutoCAD? Is everything so slooow because it’s sup­posed to be slow, or do I have too wimpy a machine to use this wonder of modern-day computing? And why am I doing this stuff in the first place?

Part I answers all these questions — and more. This part also includes what may seem like a great deal of excruciating detail about setting up a new draw­ing in AutoCAD. But what’s even more excruciating is to do your setup work incorrectly and then feel as though AutoCAD is fighting you every step of the way. With a little drawing setup work done in advance, it won’t.
Part II: Let There Be Lines

In this part, it’s time for some essential concepts, including object properties and CAD precision techniques. I know that you’re raring to make some draw­ings, but if you don’t get a handle on this stuff early on, you’ll be terminally (or is that monitor-ally? ) confused when you try to draw and edit objects. If you want to make drawings that look good, plot good, and are good, read this stuff!

After the concepts preamble, the bulk of this part covers the trio of activities that you’ll probably spend most of your time in AutoCAD doing: drawing objects, editing them, and zooming and panning to see them better on the screen. These are the things that you do in order to create the geometry — that is, the CAD representations of the objects in the real world that you’re designing. By the end of Part II, you should be pretty good at geometry, even if your ninth-grade math teacher told you otherwise.
Part III: If Drawings Could Talk

CAD drawings do not live on lines alone — most of them require quite a bit of text, dimensioning, and hatching in order to make the design intent clear to the poor chump who has to build your amazing creation. (Whoever said “a picture is worth a thousand words” must not have counted up the number of words on the average architectural drawing!) This part shows you how to add these essential features to your drawings.

After you’ve gussied up your drawing with text, dimensions, and hatching, you’ll probably want to create a snapshot of it to show off to your client, con­tractor, or grandma. Normal people call this process “printing,” but CAD people call it “plotting.” Whatever you decide to call it, I’ll show you how to do it.

Part IV: Share and Share Alike

A good CAD user, like a good kindergartner, plays well with others. AutoCAD encourages this behavior with a host of drawing- and data-sharing features. Blocks, external reference files, and raster images encourage reuse of parts of drawings, entire drawings, and bitmap image files. The new sheet sets feature in AutoCAD 2005 opens up new possibilities for creating, organizing, and pub­lishing the many drawings that compose a typical CAD project. CAD stan­dards serve as the table manners of the CAD production process — they define and regulate how people create drawings so that sharing can be more productive and predictable. AutoCAD’s Internet features enable sharing of drawings well beyond your hard disk and local network.
The drawing and data sharing features in AutoCAD takes you way beyond old-style, pencil-and-paper design and drafting. After you’ve discovered how to apply the techniques in this part, you’ll be well on your way to full CAD-nerd-hood (you may want to warn your family beforehand).

Part V: The Part of Tens

This part contains guidelines that minimize your chances of really messing up drawings (your own or others’), and techniques for swapping drawings with other people and accessing them from other computer programs. There’s a lot of meat packed into these two chapters — juicy tidbits from years of drafting, experimentation, and fist-shaking at things that don’t work right — not to mention years of compulsive list-making. I hope that you find these lists help you get on the right track quickly and stay there.
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