364 Part III: If Drawings Could Talk

The Hide Paperspace Objects check box controls whether AutoCAD hides objects that are behind other objects when a 3D model is displayed in a viewport.

Plot Upside-Down: Select this check box if you want to rotate the plot 180 degrees on the paper. (It’s a handy option for plotting in the Southern Hemisphere or for avoiding having to cock your head at an uncomfortable angle as you watch plots come out of the plotter.)

AutoCAD normally generates plots in the foreground — that is, the plotting process takes over the program for the entire time that the program is creating the plot. AutoCAD includes a background plotting feature that returns control of the program to you more quickly. If you have a reasonably fast computer with adequate memory, turn on this feature in the Options dialog box: Type OPTIONS (or OP) and press Enter, click the Plot and Publish tab; from in the Background Processing Options area, select Plotting.

If you want to automate plotting for a batch of drawings, check out the sheet sets feature in AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT. One of the tasks that sheet sets are designed to accomplish is the publishing of a set of drawing sheets at one fell swoop. If this sounds like your ticket to plotting bliss, go to the online help system and type Work with Sheets in a Sheet Set in the Search Help Resources box.

The Plot Sickens

No matter how many times you read this chapter or how carefully you study the AutoCAD documentation, you’ll occasionally run into plotting problems. You’re especially likely to encounter problems when trying to plot other people’s drawings because you don’t always know what plotting conventions they had in mind. (Plotting conventions aren’t where spies meet; they’re a standardized approach to plotting issues.)

By far, one of the most common plotting problems occurs because people have used object property overrides instead of sticking to ByLayer. For example, you want to plot an architectural drawing to show the client the general room layout. You don’t want to confuse them with all the dimensions, so you freeze the Dimension layer. Oops, only half of the dimensions go away, but so do several walls, a couple of windows, and the bathtub.

Table 16-1 describes some of the more common plotting problems and solutions.

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366 Part III: If Drawings Could Talk

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Part IV

Advancing with AutoCAD

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After you get the lines and text right, you may be justified in thinking that your work in

AutoCAD is done. But AutoCAD enables you to do so much more! Blocks and external references help you manage data within drawings, between drawings, and across a network. Parametric drawing lets you maintain the intent of your designs. If you plan to share drawings (whether among your own projects, with people in your office, or with folks in other companies), you need to think about consistency in presentation and drawing organization.

The Internet is the biggest ongoing swap meet in human history, and AutoCAD offers some unique trading possibilities — and potential pitfalls — via e-mail and the Web. And if you think the Internet is big, wait until you learn about The Cloud and how AutoCAD can use it.

With the information in this part, you’ll be teaching AutoCAD how to give and receive in no time.

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17

The ABCs of Blocks

In This Chapter

Introducing blocks

Creating block definitions

Inserting blocks

Using attributes in blocks

Using PURGE to remove unwanted block definitions

In Chapter 11, you can see how to copy objects within a drawing, or even to another drawing. That’s one way to use AutoCAD to improve drafting

efficiency. You can copy a DWG file and then modify it to create a similar drawing — an even better productivity booster, as long as you’re in the habit of making similar drawings. But all those are baby steps compared with the techniques that we cover in this chapter and

Chapter 18: treating drawings, parts of drawings, drawings saved in web format (DWF, or Design Web Format), Autodesk Inventor 3D models, PDFs, MicroStation DGN files, and raster images as reusable and updateable modules. If you want to make drafting production more efficient with AutoCAD, you want to know

how to use blocks, xrefs, IPTs, IAMs, PDFs, DWFs, DGNs, and raster files.

In this chapter, we present the ABCs of blocks — basic creation and insertion, adding attributes, and getting rid of block definitions you no longer need or want. In Chapter 18, we show you how to make even more of already-created drawing data, includ-

ing dynamic blocks, associative array objects, and several flavors of external reference files (including PDFs and MicroStation DGN files) and raster images.

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