Planning and Laying Out a Drawing

Planning and Laying Out a Drawing
For the next object, the bathtub, you’ll use some new commands to lay out parts of the drawing.
This will help you get a feel for the kind of planning you must do to use AutoCAD effectively.
You’ll begin the bathtub by using the Line command to draw a rectangle 2´-8˝ × 5´-0˝ (81 cm × 152
cm for metric users) on the left side of the drawing area. For a change this time, you’ll use a couple
of shortcut methods built into AutoCAD: the Line command’s keyboard shortcut, and the Direct
Distance method for specifying distance and direction.
First, though, you’ll go back to the previous view of your drawing and arrange some more room
to work. Follow these steps:
1. Return to your previous view, shown in Figure 3.7. A quick way to do this is to choose
View  Zoom  Previous. Your view returns to the one you had before the last Zoom
command.


2. Type L↵, and, at the Specify first point: prompt, enter 9,10↵ to start the line at the 0´-9˝,
0´-10˝ coordinate. Metric users should enter 24,27↵ for the coordinate 24.0000,27.0000.
3. Place your cursor to the right of the last point selected so that the rubber-banding line is pointing
directly to the right, and type 2´8˝; then, press ↵ for the first side of the tub. Metric users
should enter 81↵. Notice that the rubber-banding line is now fixed at the length you typed.
4. Point the rubber-banding line upward toward the top of the screen, and type 5´; then, press ↵
for the next side. Metric users should enter 152↵.
5. Point the rubber-banding line directly to the left of the last point, and type 2´8˝ (81 for metric
users); then, press ↵ for the next side.
6. Type C↵ to close the rectangle and exit the Line command.
TIP Instead of pressing ↵ during the Direct Distance method, you can press the spacebar or rightclick,
and choose Enter from the shortcut menu.
Now you have the outline of the tub. Notice that when you enter feet and inches from the keyboard,
you must avoid hyphens or spaces. Thus, 2 feet 8 inches is typed as 2´8˝. Also notice that you
don’t have to enter the at sign (@) or angle specification. Instead, you use the Direct Distance
method to specify direction and distance. You can use this method for drawing lines or moving and
copying objects at right angles. The Direct Distance method is less effective if you want to specify
exact angles other than right angles.
Some of the keyboard shortcuts for tools or commands you’ve used in this chapter are CO
(Copy), E (Erase), EL (Ellipse), F (Fillet), M (Move), O (Offset), and TR (Trim). Remember that you
can enter keyboard shortcuts, such as keyboard commands, only when the Command prompt is
visible in the Command window.