Creating a New Drawing by Using Parts from Another Drawing

Creating a New Drawing by Using Parts from Another Drawing
This section explains how to use the Wblock command (which you learned about in Chapter 4)
to create a separate staircase drawing by using the staircase you’ve already drawn for the lobby.
Although you haven’t turned the existing stairs into a block, you can still use Wblock to turn parts
of a drawing into a file.
Follow these steps:
1. If you closed the Lobby file, open it now. If you didn’t create the lobby drawing, open the
Lobby.dwg (or Lobby-metric.dwg) file.
2. Chose File  Export, or type export↵ to open the Export Data dialog box.
3. Enter stair.dwg in the File Name text box, and click Save. By including the .dwg filename
extension, you let AutoCAD know that you want to export to a drawing file and not some
other file format, such as .dxf or .wmf.
4. At the Enter name of existing block or [= (block=output file)/* (whole drawing)]
: prompt, press ↵. When you export to a .dwg format, AutoCAD
assumes you want to export a block. Bypassing this prompt by pressing ↵ tells AutoCAD that
you want to create a file from part of the drawing, rather than from a block.
5. At the Specify insertion base point: prompt, pick the lower-right corner of the stair
shaft. This tells AutoCAD the base point for the new drawing.
6. At the Select objects: prompt, use a window to select the stair shaft, as shown in Figure 6.23.


7. When the stair shaft, including the door, is highlighted, press ↵ to confirm your selection.
The stairs disappear.
8. Because you want the stairs to remain in the lobby drawing, click the Undo button to bring
them back. Undo doesn’t affect any files you might export by choosing File  Export, by
using Wblock, or by using the Make Block tool.
Drawing Parallel Lines with Multilines
If you need to draw a continuous, straight set of parallel lines, AutoCAD offers multilines (the Multiline command
and its equivalent tool on the Draw menu) for this purpose. Multilines are multiple parallel lines that
you can use to represent walls. You can also customize multilines to display solid fills, center lines, and additional
linetypes. You can save your custom multilines as multiline styles, which are in turn saved in special
files for easy access from other drawings.
Multilines aren’t used often, but if you’d like to learn more about them, use the AutoCAD Help window
and look up the Mline, Mledit, and Mlstyle commands.