Just Enough AutoCAD Chapter 12 Laying Out and Printing Your Drawing Setting Up a Drawing for Printing Printing Your Drawing Storing Your Printer Settings Controlling Color, Lines, and Fills though Plot Styles Assigning Named Plot Styles Directly to Layers and Objects Converting a Drawing from Color Plot Styles to Named Plot Styles

Just Enough AutoCAD Chapter 12 Printing and the layout tabs go hand in hand. As the name implies, the layout tabs let you layout your drawing for final printing. The layout tab shows you the printed sheet, the margin shown dashed, and the drawing inside a rectangular area called a viewport.

Just Enough AutoCAD Chapter 12 The viewport is the main feature of the layout tab. It is like a window to your model tab showing you your drawing. You can enlarge or reduce your view through the viewport or give an exact scale for the viewport view. You can also have multiple viewport showing different views of the drawing in the model tab.

Just Enough AutoCAD Chapter 12 Normally, when you first open a layout tab, you’ll find that you cannot edit anything inside the viewport. You can switch to floating model space mode by clicking the Model or Paper space button in the status bar. When you do this the first time, several things happen. The viewport border thickens, the UCS icon appears inside the viewport, and the Model or Paper space button changes to read “MODEL”. Once in this mode, you can zoom and pan, or do anything within the viewport that you would normally do in the model tab. This helps you position your drawing or part of your drawing within the viewport.

Just Enough AutoCAD Chapter 12 The layout tab lest you layout a drawing. The Plot dialog box gives you control over the details of your plot. From here you select your printer, sheet size, orientation and other settings.

Just Enough AutoCAD Chapter 12 One feature unique to AutoCAD is the plot style table. This feature lets you control the line quality of your drawing. You can control line weights and shading through this feature. Plots styles are settings stored by name on your computer. You can have several plot styles and apply them to your plots depending on the look you want.

Just Enough AutoCAD Chapter 12 By default, AutoCAD supplies a single viewport in a layout tab. You can add additional viewports using the Viewports dialog box (View > Viewports > New Viewports).

Just Enough AutoCAD Chapter 12 Viewport are line other AutoCAD objects: They can be erased and you can edit their properties through the Properties palette. One notable property of a viewport is it’s scale setting. This is where you can set the exact scale of your printed or plotted drawing.

Just Enough AutoCAD Chapter 12 By using multiple viewport, you can show different types of information using the same drawing. For example, you can set the layer settings in each viewport to show different types of information as shown in this image.

Just Enough AutoCAD Chapter 12 You can control the visibility of layers in the individual viewports through the Current VP Freeze option of the Layer Properties Manage. Go to floating model space mode, click inside the viewport, then open the Layer Properties Manager dialog box and make your layer settings.