Datasheet
Not everyone can touch-type; however, I appreciate being able to. (This may be a good
time to thank my mother for insisting that I take high school typing in 1967—an era when
the manual typewriters used in classrooms had blank keys so you wouldn’t hunt and peck.)
The OPTIONS command (see Chapter 2, “Managing Your System”) allows you to set
all drawing aids, file search paths, the appearance of the screen, and the variables affecting
saving and opening drawings, and also lets you save these settings in a user profile. The
profiles can be exported for use on other computers.
APERTURE
The APERTURE variable allows you to control how close you must be to an object, meas-
ured in pixels, when using an osnap. It can also be set using the Drafting tab of the OPTIONS
dialog box. If you’re having trouble isolating an object in a cluttered area, try setting this
value to a smaller size—I prefer a setting of 3. If you’re having trouble picking an object
because you have to get too close to it, try a larger size.
PICKBOX is similar, but it controls the size of the box that shows up when you’re
asked to select an object for editing. You can also control it visually using the Drafting
tab of the OPTIONS dialog box. I like a setting of 3 for this one, as well.
LTSCALE
In the past, it was common to set this variable to the reciprocal of the intended plot scale.
If you use layouts properly, however, you shouldn’t use LTSCALE to control the appear-
ance of linetypes, because it’s global and affects all lines in a drawing. Instead, set
LTSCALE, CELTSCALE, and PSLTSCALE all to 1 and ignore the appearance of your line-
types until you set up a layout. With PSLTSCALE set to 1, your linetypes scale automati-
cally in Paper Space, so they plot the same regardless of the ZOOM factor used for the
viewport in which they appear.
Some people don’t like drawing in the Model Space tab unless their linetypes display cor-
rectly. I don’t think it should matter. If you put entities representing each linetype on a differ-
ent layer and use different colors for those layers, you can easily identify the type of line it
represents without seeing the segments. Once you have a layout, everything will look great.
There has been pressure over the years to eliminate the AutoCAD command line because it’s
seen by some people as outdated. I’ve always found this suggestion alarming, because a key-
board jockey can be much faster and more efficient than a toolbar user with comparable
skills. For us keyboard users, Autodesk’s decision to make the command line one more
optional aspect of the interface was a welcome response to this pressure.
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