Overview

• Setting up drawing units

• Using AutoCAD's grid

• Zooming in and out of a drawing

• Naming and saving a file

In Chapter 2, we explored the default drawing area that is set up when you open a new drawing. It's probably 9 units high by 12 to 16 units wide, depending on the size of your monitor. You drew a box within this area. If you drew the additional diagram offered as a supplemental exercise, the drawing area was set up the same way.

For most of the rest of this book, you'll be developing drawings for a cabin with outside wall dimensions of 25' 16', but the tools you use and the skills you learn will enable you to draw objects of any size. In this chapter, you'll learn how to set up the drawing area to lay out the floor plan for a building of a specific size. The Decimal units with which you have been drawing until now will be changed to feet and inches, and the drawing area will be transformed so that it can represent an area large enough to display the floor plan of the cabin you'll be drawing.

You'll be introduced to some new tools that will help you visualize the area your screen represents and allow you to draw lines to a specified incremental distance, such as to the nearest foot. Finally, you'll save this drawing to a floppy disk or to a special folder on your hard disk. At the...