Datasheet

Below the menus are the Standard and Styles toolbars. The Standard toolbar
contains 25 commonly used command buttons (LT has only 23). Several of these
buttons will be familiar to Windows users; the rest are AutoCAD commands. The
Styles toolbar to the right defines the appearance of any new objects in the draw-
ing. Just below these toolbars are the Workspaces, Layers, and Properties tool-
bars, which together contain six command buttons and six drop-down lists.
The blank middle section of the screen is called the drawing area. Notice the
movable crosshair cursor. The crosshairs on your cursor might not extend com-
pletely across the screen. Later in this chapter I will show you how to modify the
length of the crosshairs as well as make a few other changes. Your screen might
or might not display the coordinate tooltips next to the intersection of the
crosshairs.
Notice the little box at the intersection of the two crosshair lines. This is one
of several forms of the AutoCAD and LT cursor. When you move the cursor off
the drawing area, it changes to the standard Windows pointing arrow. As you
begin using commands, it will take on other forms, depending on which step of a
command you’re performing.
The icon with a double arrow in the lower-left corner of the drawing area is the
UCS icon (UCS stands for user coordinate system). It indicates the positive
direction for the X and Y coordinates. You won’t need it for most of the chapters
in this book, so you’ll learn how to turn it off in Chapter 3.
At the bottom of the drawing area are three tabs: a Model tab and two Layout
tabs. You use these tabs to switch between viewing modes. (I’ll discuss viewing
modes in Chapter 13.) This example shows no toolbars floating in the drawing
area, but one toolbar is docked on either side of the drawing area. Your screen
might or might not have the toolbars, or they might be in different positions. If
the toolbars are floating within the drawing area, rather than docked along one
edge, they will have a colored title bar. For specifics, see the section “Using the
Toolbars” later in this chapter.
Drawing area
User Coordinate
System
(UCS) icon
Model and
layout tabs
Crosshair cursor
Chapter 1 • Getting to Know AutoCAD8
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