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beginners beginner- Help with drawing setup


udo

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i have toyed with the idea of learning autocad for years. have played around with many versions and was always confused as ever. finally i have taken the pluge and splased out and bought autocad 2008.

i also bought a tutorial cd on the net and i searched the net for tutorial options.

all those tutorial use a different pageview than the one on my computer and none of the tuts teach how to set up the page. now i find it cofusing to say the least when i am supposed to learn from a page that looks utterly different then mine.

at this stage i can't even draw a line.

is there anyone out there who can help me to set my page up to match any of the existing tutorials???

help please.

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Whose tutorial are you following?

 

When you first start a new drawing in AutoCAD 2008 what do you see?

 

Why do you say the "tutorial uses a different pageview"? What is the difference you're seeing between your screen and the tutorial?

 

Does the tutorial (off the CD) come with drawings corresponding to the ones you see in your book? Have you opened any of these drawings?

 

We draw our objects in Model Space. We set up our title block and border in a Layout. Dimensions and notes can go in either but that's kind of down the road for you at the moment given that you say "at this stage I can't even draw a line".

 

Start with the basics. Open one of the drawings that came on the CD. Then find the Line command. Click on it. Draw a line. Any kind of line, at any angle. Are you familiar with any kind of graphics program like Paint or its equivalent? The process of drawing a line is pretty much the same. Pick a starting point, drag the mouse, click at the end of the line. Can you do this?

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Welcome to the forum udo,

 

i would suggest going out and getting

Ellen Finkelsteins "AutoCAD 2008 and AutoCADLT 2008 Bible" and

work through that first, there are a couple of other's you could look at as well.

 

Take a look at this thread HERE

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thanks everyone for your responses. now i may have exaggerated a little in that i can draw a line but not much more...

the frustrating thing to me is when i watch a tutorial and the pageview is totally different from what i see on my screen.

for starters my screen is black and just about everything looks different than on any tutorial i have tried so far. at a beginners level that throws me totally out.

isn't there anyone who starts with how to set up the page view, what buttons to press and how to customise what needs to be customised, explaining what snap and osnap etc means before getting into anything?

there is nothing worse for a beginner than to be confused by the look of things!

i loked at all of the above suggestions and the sugested websites do not cater for beginners they confuse beginners (at least they confuse me) because they do not cater for a level playing ground.

looks like i have continue with my ruler, pen and rubber and place autocad into the too hard basket yet again.

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Take a look at this site. There are a total of 48 free tutorials for AutoCAD 2008.

 

http://www.we-r-here.com/cad/tutorials/index.htm

 

Next, start using the correct terminology. That black screen area you see is referred to as Model Space. That is where you draw your house, gear, electrical schematic, cell phone, whatever it is you're trying to depict. The best advice is to draw everything full size no matter if the object is as small as a pen or as large as a 747 jumbo jet draw it full size. Pick a unit of measure. Drawing a house? Then use architectural units. Drawing a pin vise? Pick decimal units. How do you make this choice? Use the units command. Become familiar with and use ortho (to keep lines straight both horizontally and vertically) and use osnaps. Osnaps give you the ability to place geometry accurately and make for clean intersections between lines. Don't worry, as some do, about limits or grid. These are but a few suggestions I would have for you.

 

Lastly, don't give up so easily. Why did you get interested in CAD in the first place? Consider, with your lack of experience and self-confidence, in purchasing the book AutoCAD for Dummies. No offense is meant by this suggestion. It is perhaps the simpliest book out there although I feel it lacks true depth. But at this point in time you don't need depth now do you? You can also check out videos of people demonstrating AutoCAD on YouTube. That should be enough to get you started. Good luck.

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and now this forum gives me a hard time to. i posted a reply but for some reason it went up in thin air.

got another day of hard trying behind me and am frustrated something shocking. i placed a website just to mention which tut i was referring to and i was told i can't do this. lost all my writing over it!

anyhow thanks everyone for trying to help but i think i am hitting my limits with autocad. my screen is the right color now (which wasn't really the issue) now after following all the instructions, i cat open a blank page anymore, when i go open it always wants to open something - it won't let me open a blank page.

here i go again

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First off, you can't place links in your text until you've reached 10 posts, it's set this way to reduce the amount of spam on the site.

 

second, it's real hard to help when we're not getting actual questions, just "help, my autocad is not working" doesn't give us much to go on, hence the follow-up questions. Don't give up on AutoCAD though, it is hard to learn, many of us have spent many many years in school and on courses to get where we are, and we're still learning new stuff every day.

 

I do hope you'll continue with AutoCAD and use this forum for all your questions, search here, search in the FAQ and ask questions, you'll learn fast, you'll see :)

 

Oh and, AutoCAD never opens just a blank page, it always opens one template or another. what happens if you go File - New?

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You need to take a chill pill. Relax. Take a deep breath.

 

To open a "blank" drawing click on File > New and select the acad.dwt drawing file template. No title block, no border, no text of any kind. Serene nothingness. Blank. Void. Happier now?

 

OK. What is your next question? We're ready, willing and able.

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thanks for that, i followed your advise and played around a little. got something onto the screen , wanted to cut some ends off but it didn't work. tried trim, erase and anything else i could think off. problem is that just playing around doesn't lead to anything - without a simple but guided excercise i can't see how i can make any progress??

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thanks ReMark and Englishman

thanks for your offer and help but i am a real hard case, i think. any help is very much appreciated but my problem seems to be that i can't see where to start and that is why i cannot come up with specific questions.

have taken some chill pills and tried again. got actually some obscure figure onto the screen. tried to play around with what i had on my screen and used help, i thought i followed the instruction to move and or trim but didn't work. autocad is very frustrating to me.

anything else i have learnt appears to have been successful because of some structural exercises that started at the real rock bottom level. with autocad it appears that there is a little bit of this and a little bit of that but i am missing a thread and instructions that work. i am aware that it is me because all you autocad gurus out there are proove that this program is brilliant. i just don't know haow i can get it started for me.

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You cannot trim the ends of a single line without resorting to temporarily adding at least one or two other lines. What could you do to make a single line shorter? Well, there's the Break command. There is also the Stretch command. With Stretch you can actually stretch a line longer or shorter. If the line is horizontal or vertical it helps to have Ortho toggled "on" to maintain the straightness of the line.

 

Yes, CAD for beginners can be a maddening exercise in frustration if you do not have someone with experience sitting beside you and guiding you. I strongly urge you to pick up a good aftermarket AutoCAD book, one that comes with a CD of drawing examples, and sitting down with it at your computer start with page 1 and slowly work your way through it.

 

My other piece of advice would be to consider taking a basic AutoCAD course at a local community college (relatively inexpensive). In the meantime put a little more effort into looking at some of the online video-tutorials that explain various commands. You want to start with the basic draw commands followed by the modify commands as these are probably the most used functions in AutoCAD.

 

Now, are you going to actually follow our advice or just sit there and keep saying "I can't do this...it's too hard"?

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You will waste soooo much time trying to figure things out yourself

I have an excellent level 1 (AutoCAD 2008) 2 disc video course which takes you through all the beginners stuff email me at Lone_Kite at hotmail.com if you are interested.

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One more tip; at the bottom of the screen you have the Command Line (a white area where you see all the commands you use). You can pull the top of the Command Line so to make it bigger. I'd recommend in the beginning to have it at least 4 or 5 lines high so you see all the text at once.

 

And learn to look at the Command Line! By reading on the Command Line you'll know what AutoCAD is wanting from you. You can't believe how many times I've gone over to a collegues station and just said "Read the command line" and watch them go pink...and these are guys and gals that have worked with the program for several years!

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I am not sure AutoCAD is what you want to learn. Think about it for a second. Where do you want to work and what edge can you give yourself to snuff out other competitors vying for that job?

 

 

We live and breath in a 3 dimensional world. Why would we want to create 2d geometry to describe our product/home/environment in 2 dimensions. I say learn Rivet first then 2d.... its easier. And the community colleges have it all wrong by making students learn 2d first. 3d first then 2d if you really need it.

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