AutoCAD For Dummies. Ralph Grabowski
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workspace. When you are in the Drafting & Annotation workspace, AutoCAD displays the interface shown earlier, in Figure 2-2.
Like all good Windows programs, AutoCAD has tooltips, those short descriptions that appear in little text boxes whenever you hover the mouse pointer over a button. In AutoCAD, tooltips display two levels of information. When you first hover the mouse pointer over a tool button, you see a short identification of the command. When you continue hovering, a longer description of the icon’s function, often with a descriptive image, appears in an extended tooltip. As helpful as they are when you’re starting with AutoCAD, you’ll probably want to remove these training wheels sooner or later because they cover up some of your drawing. You can do so in the Options dialog box. See the online Help system for more information.
I’m intrigued by the computer industry’s fascination with icons. Traditional Chinese uses about 450,000 icons, but in the 1950s Simplified Chinese came into being with only 4,500 icons. On the other hand, Korean is generally considered to be the best written language in the world. It has 24 “letters,” no punctuation marks, does not distinguish between uppercase and lowercase, and is perfectly phonetic. On the other, other hand, AutoCAD uses about 1,300 icons.
Looking for Mr. Status Bar
The status bar (see Figure 2-6), which appears at the bottom of the AutoCAD screen, displays — and allows you to change — several important drawing modes, aids, and settings that affect how you draw and edit in the current drawing.
FIGURE 2-6: Status (bars) check.
Earlier AutoCAD releases allowed you to change status bar buttons to display icons or traditional text labels. Now, unfortunately, we’re stuck with icons only. The good news is that the F keys (F3, F5, and so on) can also be used to turn on and off the most commonly used drawing modes.
I cover each status bar setting as appropriate when I discuss its relevant commands. See the online extras for a description of each of the status bar buttons.
Using Dynamic Input
The Dynamic Input tooltip doesn’t display options unless you press the down-arrow key, as shown in Figure 2-7. Pressing the up-arrow key displays previous input.
FIGURE 2-7: Choosing command options from the Dynamic Input menu.
Let your fingers do the talking: The command line
The command line (or command window, or command prompt, or command area, or whatever else you want to call it), as shown in Figure 2-8, is a throwback to the dark ages of AutoCAD. It puzzles newcomers and delights AutoCAD aficionados. Despite the razzle-dazzle of Dynamic Input, the command line is still the most efficient way to perform many AutoCAD operations.
Cozy up to the command line, because it’s AutoCAD’s primary communications conduit to you. AutoCAD displays prompts, warnings, and error messages in the command line that Dynamic Input may not show. Even when Dynamic Input gives you the same info, glancing at the command line is more efficient.
The command line is a semitransparent toolbar that can float anywhere on the screen, allowing drawings to show through it. This recovers some of the vertical window area that was lost to the Ribbon. Hey, Microsoft, computer screens are getting wider, not taller! By default, the command line displays one command input line plus the last three input prompts, but you can change the number of prompts that are displayed.
As a command is running, the command line often displays several options that can be chosen during the command. You choose an option by entering the uppercase letter or letters shown in each option, such as Close or LWeight. It’s usually, but not always, the first letter. Some commands have more than one option whose name begins with the same letter, such as Entity versus Exit, so you enter E for Entity but X for eXit. For consistency, some options use a letter other than the first letter even if the current command doesn’t have conflicts. The most common example is eXit, which always uses X even if no other options in the current prompt start with E. Entering command option choices is not case-dependent. X or x will both work. However, ON and OFF must be entered in full because they are shown in all uppercase.
FIGURE 2-8: Obey the command line; that is an order.
You don’t even need to type the option letter. You can select an option by using the mouse and clicking it in the command line.
The key(board) to AutoCAD success
Despite (or because of) AutoCAD’s long heritage as the most successful CAD software for personal computers, newcomers are still astonished at the amount of typing they have to do. Modern programs have much less dependency on the keyboard than AutoCAD does, but as you get used to it, you’ll find that no other input method gives you as much flexibility or speed as pounding the ivories — oops, wrong keyboard!
Typing at your computer’s keyboard is an efficient way to run certain commands, and it’s the only way to run others. Instead of hunting for a button or scrolling through a menu, you can start a command by typing the command name, seeing which ones AutoCAD presents to you, and pressing Enter when you find the right one. Even better, for many common commands, you can type the short form for a command name (known as an alias)