The application is pretty easy to use, so you may feel inclined to skip the rest of this manual, only using it as a reference.
That is just fine. However, before you get carried away and actually start producing your masterpieces, there are a few things you should consider.
The most important thing to understand is that almost everything related to the drawing is stored with each drawing. This is simple and conceptually clear. However, this means that there is no way to change something for every drawing in a single operation, sort of globally. As you work, you will notice that you always prefer to have some settings in a particular way, one that suits your style. In order to avoid adjusting the settings for each new drawing from scratch, you would be well advised to create a ’template’ drawing that contains the settings just as you like them.
Of course, the application comes with built in templates that conform to ISO standard engineering drawing formats for sizes from A4 to A0 and, of course, the application tries to provide reasonable default values for everything both in the templates and for files created with the ’File/New...’ command.
But there are bound to be settings that are not to your liking.
A simple way to manage this is just to create an empty drawing with your desired settings and then, each time you start a new drawing, open that template drawing and use the ’File/Save As...’ command to give it a different name. It’s important to remember to ’Save As’ it first, as otherwise you’ll be likely to modify your template!
However, a better alternative is to save your templates into a special ’templates’ directory (see Appendix A for details on how to find this directory). Anything that is stored there will be visible in the ’File/Templates’ menu. Selecting a drawing from that menu will create an ’Untitled’ copy of the template, forcing you to give it a proper name before saving it, thus preventing you from messing up your templates.
Maybe better yet is to take one of the ’built in’ standard templates and modify them. To do that just use the ’File/Open...’ command and find your way to the ’template’ directory.
Below is a list of things you might like to adjust to your liking. Note that, depending on your requirements, it might make sense to have a different set of templates depending on which sort of project you are working on. Drafting usually involves producing a set of drawings.
Note that the best time to create templates is probably after your first ’real’ drawing, because only by doing a real drawing will you get to know what your needs are.
Obviously, different sized drawings are needed for drawing parts of different sizes (and scales). Coordinate Systems A drawing can have any number of coordinate systems, each with their own origin and scale. The scale is the most important aspect of a coordinate system as the scale of the current coordinate system determines the units used in drawing with numeric values and in dimensioning. Typically, a drawing will have at least two coordinate systems, one that corresponds to the physical paper and is used for working with e.g. the title block, and another one that is determined by the part you are drawing.
A snap grid is used to force dimensions to a multiple of some basic unit, say 1 mm or 0.1 inch. Even if your style of drawing is based on geometrical construction, a grid is often a handy aid. Printer setup Perhaps not the first thing that comes to mind, but printing has a lot of options, and naturally you’ll want to print as soon as the drawing is ready and often before that. It is rather annoying if the printout then comes out partially clipped or in wrong scale. Equally annoying and wasteful is setting print parameters for each new drawing, especially as within an office the printing conditions tend to stay the same.
Line style defines the width, color and dashing of a line. For additional consideration on colors see below for ’use of colors’. Line styles a large de-facto defined by drafting standards. However, you may have your own preferences and variations. Worth noting is that any shape you draw refers to, but does not contain, a line style, thus changing the line style will change the line style of all shapes drawn with that line style within the document, but not across documents.
All shapes or drawing primitives, lines, circle etc., in a drawing reside on a layer. Layers define common attributes or properties for those shapes. For example you can turn a layer ’off’ to temporarily hide shapes on that layer. There are various layering schemes, such as keeping sketching and dimensioning on their own layers. In architectural drawings it might makes sense to have separate layers for structural, electrical, air condition etc etc.
Unlike in artistic drawings or illustrations, it is typical in a CAD drawing to use colors to distinguish between shapes on different layers. Therefore, even though a line style contains a definition for color, it can be overridden, but the color is defined for each layer. Indeed, that is the norm. Further consider that the physical paper is white, whereas many people prefer to work on a black background on the screen. A common and handy way to use colors is to have all colors defined as you want them to appear on paper. To do that, set the colors for line styles as desired. Often this reduces to using black for every line style. Then, to use colors to distinguish between layers on screen, use layer colors to override the line style colors. To get a black background on screen, do not set the background to black but use the ’Invert Colors’ option in the Preferences -dialogue instead. As you will be working with inverted colors, it is best to set and define the layer color scheme after you have turned on the inverted colors option.