TABLE OF CONTENTS Now that you have created drawings of a typical apartment unit and the apartment build- ing's lobby and stairs, you can assemble them to complete the first floor of the apartment building. In this chapter, you will take full advantage of AutoCAD's features to enhance your drawing skills, as well as to reduce the time it takes to create accurate drawings.
As your drawing becomes larger, you will find that you need to use the Zoom and Pan commands more often. Larger drawings also require some special editing techniques. You will learn how to assemble and view drawings in ways that will save you time and effort as your design progresses. Along the way, you'll see how you can enhance the appearance of your drawings by adding hatch patterns.
One of the best time-saving features of AutoCAD is its ability to quickly duplicate repetitive elements in a drawing. In this section, you'll assemble the drawings you've been working on into the complete floor plan of a fictitious apartment project. This will demonstrate how you can quickly and accurately copy your existing drawings in a variety of ways.
Start by creating a new file for the first floor:
Create a new file named Plan to contain the drawing of the apartment building's first floor. This is the file you will use to assemble the unit plans into an apartment building. If you want to use a template file, use the Acad.dwt template file. Metric users...
