Learning AutoCAD® 2010, Volume 2

Learning AutoCAD® 2010, Volume 2

Using hands-on exercises, learn the features, commands, and techniques for creating,
editing, and printing drawings with AutoCAD® 2010 and AutoCAD LT® 2010 software

Acknowledgements

The Autodesk Learning team wishes to thank everyone who participated in the development of this
project, with special acknowledgement to the authoring contributions and subject matter expertise of
Ron Myers and CrWare, LP.
CrWare, LP began publishing courseware for Autodesk® Inventor® in 2001. Since that time, the
company has grown to include full-time curriculum developers, subject matter experts, technical
writers, and graphics specialists, each with a unique set of industry experiences and talents that
enables CrWare to create content that is both accurate and relevant to meeting the learning needs of
its readers and customers.
The company's Founder and General Partner, Ron Myers, has been using Autodesk® products since
1989. During that time, Ron Myers worked in all disciplines of drafting and design, until 1996 when
he began a career as an Applications Engineer, Instructor, and Author. Ron Myers has been creating
courseware and other training material for Autodesk since 1996 and has written and created training
material for AutoCAD®, Autodesk Inventor, AutoCAD® Mechanical, Mechanical Desktop®, and
Autodesk® Impression.

Working with Layouts

Your design is only as good as your ability to communicate it to others. Your drawings can contain a lot
of different information, and you need to be able to output a variety of aspects of the design.
Layouts and viewports help you to structure and focus your design and its supporting information for
the final step of communicating it to others through both paper and electronic media.
You also need to understand how Layouts and Viewports work before you can add annotations, such
as dimensions and text, to your drawings.
ObjectivesAfter completing this chapter, you will be able to:
* Identify the environments in which you can plot data and create a new layout.
* Create and manipulate viewports.
* In this exercise, you use what you learned about working with layouts to create and configure a
layout with three viewports

Creating Rectangular Viewports

You create a rectangular viewport similar to the way you create a rectangle. However, a rectangular
viewport created in a Layout is a kind of window that displays the geometry from the model space
view into the current layout page.
You scale the view of the geometry displayed in each viewport and typically plot the overall layout 1:1.
You can have more than one viewport on a single layout page showing different views of your drawing
at different scales.
Typically the viewport is not plotted. You can create the viewport on a unique layer so that you can
use the layer properties to prevent the viewport boundary from plotting

Manipulating Viewports

You can manipulate viewports in many ways. If you no longer want the viewport and the data it
displays, you can use the Erase command to delete it. Since it only displays geometry from model
space, deleting the viewport does not delete the model space geometry. You can use the Move
command to change a viewport's position on the paper. You can also use the Copy command to
duplicate the viewport and its display settings to another location on the layout. To resize a viewport,
use the grips at its corners.
Another way of manipulating a viewport is to freeze the display of model space layers. By controlling
the display of model space layers per viewport in this way, you can display the same area of model
space in different ways in each viewport. To freeze or thaw the layer in the current viewport (1), the
layout viewport must be active. To make a layout viewport active, you double-click inside the viewport
boundary. You know when a viewport is active because the boundary is highlighted, as shown in
the following illustration (2), and the crosshairs change to an arrow cursor when you pass over the
viewport boundary.

You can override layer properties in each viewport to have them appear differently in a viewport than
they do in model space. For example, you may want your layout to display the walls in a different
color than they are displayed in the model. Property overrides are accessed from the Layer Properties
Manager when opened with a layout tab current.
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