Setting Up the Drawing Limits

Setting Up the Drawing Limits
One of the big advantages in using AutoCAD is that you can draw at full scale; you aren’t limited
to the edges of a piece of paper the way you are in manual drawing. But you may find it difficult
to start drawing without knowing where the drawing boundaries are. You can set up some arbitrary
boundaries using the Limits feature. You got a taste of the Limits feature in Chapter 1. You’ll
use it again here to set up a work area for your next drawing.





You’ll be drawing a bathroom that is roughly 8 feet by 5 feet (230 cm by 150 cm for metric users).
You’ll want to give yourself some extra room around the bathroom, so your drawing limits should
be a bit larger than that actual bathroom size. You’ll use an area of 11´ by 8´6˝ for the limits of your
drawing. Metric users will use an area 297 cm by 210 cm. These sizes will accommodate your bathroom
with some room to spare.
Now that you know the area you need, you can use the Limits command to set up the area:
1.
Choose Format 
Drawing Limits.
2.
At the
Specify lower left corner or [ON/OFF] <0>: prompt, specify the
lower-left corner of your work area. Press
↵
to accept the default.
3.
At the
Specify upper right corner <1>: prompt,
specify the upper-right corner
of your work area. (The default is shown in brackets.) Enter
132,102
. Or if you prefer,
you can enter
11´,8´6
, because you’ve set up your drawing for architectural units. Metric
users should enter
297,210
.
4.
Choose View 
Zoom 
All, or type
Z
↵
A
↵
. Although it appears that nothing has changed,
your drawing area is now set to a size that will enable you to draw your bathroom at full scale.
TIP
You can toggle through the Coordinate Readout modes by repeatedly pressing Ctrl+I or by
clicking the coordinate readout on the status bar. For more on the Coordinate Readout modes, see
Chapter 1.
5.
Move the cursor to the upper-right corner of the drawing area, and watch the coordinate
readout. Notice that now the upper-right corner has a Y coordinate of approximately 8´-6˝,
or 210 for metric users. The X coordinate depends on the proportion of your AutoCAD
window. The coordinate readout also displays distances in feet and inches.
In step 5, the coordinate readout shows you that your drawing area is larger than before, but
no visual clues tell you where you are or what distances you’re dealing with. To help you get your
bearings, you can turn on Grid mode, which you’ll learn about toward the end of this chapter. Grid
mode displays an array of dots that help you visualize distances and the limits of your drawing.