by Mark Middlebrook
AutoCAD
®
2005
FOR
DUMmIES
‰
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AutoCAD
®
2005
FOR
DUMmIES
‰
571389 FM.qxd 4/13/04 3:53 PM Page i
571389 FM.qxd 4/13/04 3:53 PM Page ii
by Mark Middlebrook
AutoCAD
®
2005
FOR
DUMmIES
‰
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AutoCAD
®
2005 For Dummies
®
Published by

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About the Author
Mark Middlebrook used to be an engineer but gave it up when he discovered
that he couldn’t handle a real job. He is now principal of Daedalus Consulting,
an independent CAD and computer consulting company in Oakland, California.
(In case you wondered, Daedalus was the guy in ancient Greek legend who
built the labyrinth on Crete. Mark named his company after Daedalus before
he realized that few of his clients would be able to pronounce it and even
fewer spell it.) Mark is also a contributing editor for CADALYST magazine
and Webmaster of
markcad.com. When he’s not busy being a cad, Mark sells
and writes about wine for Paul Marcus Wines in Oakland. He also teaches
literature and philosophy classes at St. Mary’s College of California — hence
“Daedalus.” AutoCAD 2005 For Dummies is his sixth book on AutoCAD.
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Introduction 1
What’s Not in This Book 1
Who Are — and Aren’t — You? 2
How This Book Is Organized 2
Part I: AutoCAD 101 3
Part II: Let There Be Lines 3
Part III: If Drawings Could Talk 4
Part IV: Share and Share Alike 4
Part V: The Part of Tens 4
Icons Used in This Book 5
A Few Conventions — Just in Case 5
Part I: AutoCAD 101 7
Chapter 1: Introducing AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT 2005 . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9
Why AutoCAD? 10
The Importance of Being DWG 11
Seeing the LT 13
Staying Alive with 2005 14
Chapter 2 : Le Tour de AutoCAD 2005 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .17
AutoCAD Does Windows 18
AutoCAD’s Opening Screen Cuisine 19
Standard Windows fare 19
Looking for Mr. Status Bar 23
Take an order: The command line area 26
Main course: The drawing area 30
A Palette-Cleanser 33
What Really Makes AutoCAD Cook? 35
Sizzling system variables 35
Delicious dialog boxes 37
Fun with F1 38
Chapter 3 : Setup for Success . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .41

Getting (Design) Centered 85
Copying layers between drawings 87
Precise-liness Is Next to CAD-liness 88
Keyboard capers: Coordinate entry 90
Grab an object and make it snappy 92
Other precision practices 97
Chapter 5: Where to Draw the Line . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .101
Introducing the AutoCAD Drawing Commands 102
The Straight and Narrow: Lines, Polylines, and Polygons 104
Toe the line 104
Connect the lines with polyline 107
Square off with rectangle 112
Choose your sides with polygon 113
(Throwing) Curves 115
Going full circle 115
Arc-y-ology 116
Ellipses (S. Grant?) 119
Splines: The sketchy, sinuous curves 121
Donuts: The circles with a difference 123
Revision clouds on the horizon 124
Scoring Points 126
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Chapter 6: Edit for Credit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .129
Commanding and Selecting 129
Command-first editing 130
Selection-first editing 130
Choosing an editing style 130
Grab It 131
One-by-one selection 132
Selection boxes left and right 132

Meshing around with surface meshes 196
A solid(s) foundation 197
Editing in three dimensions 199
Ending with Rendering 200
xiii
Table of Contents
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Part III: If Drawings Could Talk 203
Chapter 9: Text with Character . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .205
Getting Ready to Write 206
Simply stylish text 206
Taking your text to new heights 209
One line or two? 212
Your text will be justified 212
Using the Same Old Line 213
Saying More in Multiline Text 215
Making it with mText 215
New mText might in AutoCAD 2005 218
Keeping tabs (and indents) on your mText 220
Modifying mText 222
Setting the Text Table 223
Tables have style, too 223
Creating and editing tables 224
Checking Out Your Spelling 227
Chapter 10: Entering New Dimensions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .229
Discovering New Dimensions 231
Anatomy of a dimension 231
A field guide to dimensions 232
Dimension associativity 233
Pulling out your dimension tools 234

Plotting success in 16 steps 271
Preview one, two 274
Instead of fit, scale it 275
Plotting the Layout of the Land 276
About paper space layouts and plotting 276
The path to paper space layout plotting success 277
Plotting Lineweights and Colors 279
Plotting with style 279
Plotting through thick and thin 283
Plotting in color 285
It’s a (Page) Setup! 287
Continuing the Plot Dialog 288
Troubles with Plotting 291
Part IV: Share and Share Alike 293
Chapter 13: Playing Blocks and Rasteroids . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .295
Rocking with Blocks 296
Creating block definitions 298
Inserting blocks 301
Attributes: Fill-in-the-blank blocks 304
Exploding blocks 308
Going External 309
Becoming attached to your xrefs 311
Layer-palooza 312
Creating and editing an external reference file 313
Forging an xref path 313
Managing xrefs 314
Blocks, Xrefs, and Drawing Organization 316
Mastering the Raster 316
Attaching an image 318
Managing images 319

Drawing Web Format — Not Just for the Web 358
All about DWF 358
ePlot, not replot 359
Making DWFs with ePlot 360
Making DWFs (or Plots) with PUBLISH 361
Hand-y objects 363
Autodesk Express Viewer 363
The Drawing Protection Racket 364
Part V: The Part of Tens 367
Chapter 17: Ten Ways to Do No Harm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .369
Be Precise 369
Control Properties by Layer 369
Know Your Drawing Scale Factor 370
Know Your Space 370
If Someone (Sheet) Set It, Don’t Forget It 370
Explode with Care 370
AutoCAD 2005 For Dummies
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Don’t Cram Your Geometry 371
Freeze Instead of Erase 371
Use CAD Standards 371
Save and Back Up Drawings Regularly 372
Chapter 18: Ten Ways to Swap Drawing Data
with Other People and Programs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .373
DWG 374
DXF 376
DWF 376
PDF 376
WMF 377

objects you draw, their properties, and the files in which they reside in
appropriate ways. You need to coordinate your CAD work with other people
in your office who will be working on or making use of the same drawings.
You need to be savvy about shipping drawings around via the Internet.
AutoCAD 2005 provides the tools for doing all these things, but it’s not always
easy to figure out which hammer to pick up or which nail to bang on first.
With this book, you have an excellent chance of creating a presentable,
usable, printable, and sharable drawing on your first or second try without
putting a T square through your computer screen in frustration.
What’s Not in This Book
Unlike many other For Dummies books, this one does tell you to consult the
official software documentation sometimes. AutoCAD is just too big and com-
plicated for a single book to attempt to describe it completely.
This book focuses on AutoCAD 2005, and also addresses its slightly less-
capable, much-lower-cost sibling, AutoCAD LT 2005. (AutoCAD LT 2005 For
Dummies, a version of this book especially for LT users, comes out several
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2
AutoCAD 2005 For Dummies
months later than the regular book.) I do occasionally mention differences
with previous versions, going back to the highly popular AutoCAD Release 14,
so that everyone has some context and upgraders can more readily under-
stand the differences. I also mention the important differences between full
AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT, so that you’ll know what you — or your LT-using
colleagues — are missing. This book does not cover the discipline-specific
features in AutoCAD-based products such as AutoCAD Architectural Desktop,
except for some general discussion in Chapter 1, but most of the information
in this book applies to the general-purpose AutoCAD features in the AutoCAD
2005-based versions of those programs as well.
Who Are — and Aren’t — You?

The following sections describe the parts that the book breaks down into.
Part I: AutoCAD 101
Need to know your way around the AutoCAD screen? Why does AutoCAD
even exist, anyway? What are all the different AutoCAD-based products that
Autodesk sells, and should you be using one of them — for example,
AutoCAD LT — instead of AutoCAD? Is everything so slooow because it’s sup-
posed to be slow, or do I have too wimpy a machine to use this wonder of
modern-day computing? And why am I doing this stuff in the first place?
Part I answers all these questions — and more. This part also includes what
may seem like a great deal of excruciating detail about setting up a new draw-
ing in AutoCAD. But what’s even more excruciating is to do your setup work
incorrectly and then feel as though AutoCAD is fighting you every step of the
way. With a little drawing setup work done in advance, it won’t.
Part II: Let There Be Lines
In this part, it’s time for some essential concepts, including object properties
and CAD precision techniques. I know that you’re raring to make some draw-
ings, but if you don’t get a handle on this stuff early on, you’ll be terminally
(or is that monitor-ally? ) confused when you try to draw and edit objects. If
you want to make drawings that look good, plot good, and are good, read this
stuff!
After the concepts preamble, the bulk of this part covers the trio of activities
that you’ll probably spend most of your time in AutoCAD doing: drawing
objects, editing them, and zooming and panning to see them better on the
screen. These are the things that you do in order to create the geometry —
that is, the CAD representations of the objects in the real world that you’re
designing. By the end of Part II, you should be pretty good at geometry, even
if your ninth-grade math teacher told you otherwise.
3
Introduction
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with other people and accessing them from other computer programs.
There’s a lot of meat packed into these two chapters — juicy tidbits from
years of drafting, experimentation, and fist-shaking at things that don’t work
right — not to mention years of compulsive list-making. I hope that you find
these lists help you get on the right track quickly and stay there.
4
AutoCAD 2005 For Dummies
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