Overview

Remember the AutoCAD days of yore? It took days to set up a plotter and hours to plot out a complex drawing. Pens ran out of ink minutes before the end of a job. Plotters seemed to think for themselves when determining the location of the end of a sheet.

Happily, those days are gone. Plotting these days causes far fewer headaches, and in more and more cases you can skip the process altogether. Many designs from AutoCAD exist to communicate directly with a machine that makes parts from microchips to logs for log homes. As a result, more and more users are distributing only electronic versions of their drawings, often as DWF or PDF files, and using them effectively without ever touching a sheet of paper. We ll always need to lay out our designs for presentation purposes, at the very least even if the drawings themselves aren t destined for paper use.

Although Paper Space had been around for several releases, layouts first showed up in AutoCAD 2000. They re the best thing since sliced bread, and you should use them. Well, I think you should use them, but I know some companies still plot directly from Model Space. In this chapter, I ll discuss some common elements that apply to plotting from either Model Space or from a layout in Paper Space, and I ll even give you some advice on Model Space plotting. But the bulk of this chapter is devoted to creating output from layouts in Paper Space plotted sheets and raster...