Chapter 4

      Setup for Success

      IN THIS CHAPTER

      The good news is that AutoCAD is very powerful and versatile. And the not-quite-so-good news is that it’s extremely powerful and versatile. This means that you can set it up to work in almost any segment of nearly any industry or application, just about anywhere in the world. AutoCAD is used for mechanical design, electrical and electronic circuit schematics, hydraulics, buildings, bridges, theatre stage layouts, cloth-cutting layouts in the clothing industry, designing big floppy clown shoes, keeping track of season’s ticket holders’ seats in a hockey arena, and so on. In short, everything from autos to zoos.

      Because most companies and schools will already have set things up to suit their particular standards, all you need to do — and in fact, must do — is to use their template files. If you’re working alone, however, you should read on to learn how to create template files of your own.

      In the long (or even medium or short) term, AutoCAD is much easier to use when you start from a drawing that’s already set up properly. There can be quite a few things to set up, but if you do things properly, you need to do it only once.

Sloppy setup really becomes apparent when you try to plot (note that CAD geeks say “Plot” whereas normal people say “Print”) your drawing. Things that seemed more or less okay as you zoomed around on the screen are suddenly the wrong size or don’t look right on paper. Chapter 16 covers plotting, but the information in this chapter is a necessary prerequisite to successful plotting and sheet setup. If you don’t get this stuff correct, there’s a good chance you’ll find that the plot sickens.

      This chapter describes the decisions you need to make before you set up a new drawing, shows the steps for doing a complete and correct setup, and demonstrates how to save setup settings for reuse.

      Then, after you digest the detailed drawing setup procedures described in this and the following chapters, use the “AutoCAD Drawing Setup Roadmap” in the book's cheat sheet as a quick reference. To get to the cheat sheet, go to www.dummies.com and type AutoCAD For Dummies in the Search box.

A Setup Roadmap

      Before you start the drawing-setup process, you need to make only two initial decisions about your new drawing:

      Choosing your units

      AutoCAD is extremely flexible about drawing units; it lets you have them your way. Usually, you choose the type of units that you normally use to talk about whatever you’re drawing: feet and inches for a building in the United States and most of Canada, millimeters for almost everything in almost all the rest of the world, and so on.

      Speaking of millimeters, here’s another choice you have to make even before you choose your units of measure — and that’s your system of measure.

      Most of the world abandoned local systems of measure generations ago. Even widely adopted ones, like the imperial system, have mostly fallen by the wayside — except, of course where feet, inches, pounds, gallons, and degrees Fahrenheit still rule.

During drawing setup, you choose settings for length units (for measuring linear objects and distances) and angle units (for measuring angles between nonparallel objects or points on arcs or circles) in the Drawing Units dialog box, as shown in Figure 4-1. (I show you how to specify these settings in the section “Setting your units,” later in this chapter.) AutoCAD’s length unit types are as follows: