Graphic Design CoursesFamiliarity with the Autocad 2d workspace is essential when working with the program. We guide you through the various elements of the interface in our Autocad 2d courses.
The Autocad workspace changed dramatically with the 2009 release in an attempt to make it more familiar to Windows 7 users, but the functionality is almost identical.
There are six main aspects to the Autocad 2d workspace: the drawing window, the pull-down menus, toolbars, the Command window, the Status Bar and the Palette windows. The drawing window is where we create all our geometry. Note the X and Y axes at the bottom left of the screen. There is also a Z-axis but we don’t see it when working in two dimensions; it’s as if we are looking at a drawing from above. Note that we have used a white background in our screenshots in order to produce clear figures, but Autocad’s default background colour is black, which may be easier on the eye when drafting for long periods of time. This can be changed in the Tools menu > Options > Display > Colours. Note the tabs at the bottom left of the screen named Model and Layouts 1 and 2. We create all our geometry in Model Space; the Layouts refer to Paper Space where we set up the parameters for printing our drawings.
When you click on a Layout tab you enter Autocad’s Paper space. This is a representation of your paper sheet. You can change the size of the sheet from A4 to A0; it can be portrait or landscape. You also have one or many Viewport windows. These are scaled according to standard Metric or Imperial scales, so that you draw in real-world dimensions, but it’s your Viewport in Paper Space that is scaled. We would also add a Title block with drawing numbers and company addresses, as well as logos. And it’s the paper sheet that would be printed or outputted as a PDF.
We explore all these features in full in our Autocad 2d classes. You can see many examples of our clients’ work on our Facebook page.
Other related Autocad 2d Blog Posts:
Autocad 2d workspace continued
Apr24
