AutoCAD Does Windows (And Office)
Whether you're a total newcomer or an experienced user from a few releases back, I can guarantee that finding your way around AutoCAD 2012 is going to be a challenging experience.
If you're already familiar with the Microsoft Office 2007 suite, you may recognize some program features, such as the Ribbon and the Application Menu, which you use for choosing commands or changing system settings. But even if AutoCAD's new look does seem a little familiar in places, many aspects of the program's appearance — and some of the ways in which you work with it — are quite different from other Windows programs. Depending on the workspace you've chosen to use, you can, in many cases, tell the program what to do in at least five ways — pick a toolbar button, pick from a pull-down menu, pick a tool button from a Ribbon panel, type at the keyboard, or choose from a right-click menu — none of which is necessarily the best method to use for every task.
Profiling your displayThe illustrations and descriptions in this chapter and throughout the book show the default configuration of the AutoCAD 2012 Drafting & Annotation workspace — that is, the way the screen looks if you use the standard version of AutoCAD 2012 (not a flavored version, such as AutoCAD Architecture 2012 or AutoCAD Mechanical 2012) and don't change any display settings. You can change workspaces by clicking either the Workspace Switching button on the status bar or the Workspace drop-down menu on the Quick Access Toolbar, and choosing a different workspace from the menu. You can change the appearance of the workspace itself with settings on the Display tab of the Options dialog box (click the Application button, and then click Options at the bottom of the Application Menu) and by dragging toolbars and other screen components.
The main change from AutoCAD's default settings that I've made for this book is to configure the drawing area background to be white because the figures show up better that way. The default background color in both AutoCAD 2012 and AutoCAD LT 2012 is dark gray, but many longtime users prefer a pure black background because they believe there's less glare that way. (This is much less of an issue with LCD flat-panel displays.) You may want to set a black or a white background on your own system or stay with the default gray background — it's your choice, and there's no right or wrong way. Some AutoCAD object colors show up better on a light background, and some are better on a black one.
You can reset the default AutoCAD 2012 color scheme from the Options dialog box Display tab. Click Colors to open the Drawing Window Colors dialog box, and then click the Restore Classic Colors button. AutoCAD 2012 includes a couple of skin-like color schemes, also accessible from the Display tab of the Options dialog box. Designed to enhance the look of the Ribbon-based interface and ingeniously named Light and Dark, the differences between them are pretty subtle and apply to Windows elements (such as the title and taskbar), not to AutoCAD elements like crosshairs or background colors.
Slick as they are, navigating Ribbon panels and browsing through the Application Menu aren't always the most efficient way of doing things. When you want to get real work done, you need to combine the Ribbon panels with other methods — especially entering options at the keyboard or choosing them from the right-click menus. I show you how throughout this book.