Technical data

Working with Drawings

Drawing Setup Example: Setting a Base Point

and North Rotation

Before you bring points into your drawing, you may want to set the

drawing orientation. The drawing orientation settings include a base

point and north rotation. These two settings control the drawing’s

coordinate system. You can adjust both the base point so that it ties

into a known coordinate system (that you can specify on the Zone tab

of the Drawing Setup dialog box), and the north rotation so that all

your project points fit within the boundaries of your plot sheet.

AutoCAD Land Development Desktop uses two coordinate systems for

locating points: X,Y and northing/easting. When you start a new

project, these values all default to 0 so that the Y coordinate is the

same as the northing, and the X coordinate is the same as the easting.

You can set up a base point to assign a specific northing and easting

value to a fixed X,Y location. For example, if your drawing points

begin at northing and easting coordinates of 5000,5000, then you can

set a new base point to translate these coordinates so they will fit onto

your drawing screen.

By default, North is always represented in a drawing as the top of the

screen. But you can define a different orientation of North if the

drawing layout requires it. You should typically set the north rotation

when you create a new drawing, but you can change it at any time.

You can give different drawings attached to the same project different

north rotations. This provides different views of the project point data

relative to the X,Y coordinates.