The example drawing in this chapter is pretty uncluttered and small, but most real CAD drawings are neither of those. Technical drawings are usually jam-packed with lines, text, and dimensions. CAD drawings often get plotted on sheets of paper that measure two to three feet on a side — that's in the hundreds of millimeters, if you're a metric maven. Anyone who owns a monitor that large probably can afford to hire a whole room of drafters (and therefore isn't reading this book). You need to zoom and pan in your drawings — a lot. I cover zooming and panning in detail in Chapter 12. Quick definitions should suffice for now:
Zooming and panning frequently lets you see the details better, draw more confidently (because you can see what you're doing), and edit more quickly (because object selection is easier when a zillion objects aren't on the screen).
Fortunately, zooming and panning in AutoCAD is as simple as it is necessary. The following steps describe how to use AutoCAD's Zoom and Pan Realtime feature, which is pretty easy to operate and provides a lot of flexibility. Chapter 12 covers additional zoom and pan options.
To zoom and pan in your drawing, follow these steps:
The Realtime option of the ZOOM command starts. The crosshairs change to a magnifying glass, and AutoCAD prompts you at the command line as follows:
Press ESC or ENTER to exit, or right-click to display shortcut menu.
As you can see, dragging up increases the zoom magnification, and dragging down decreases it.
The magnifying-glass pointer changes to a hand.
You're not moving the plate, although it may look like it. You're moving your viewing position while the plate stays put. Never move drawing objects if you just want to view them from a different position.
You can use the right-click menu to toggle back and forth between Zoom and Pan as many times as you like. If you get lost, choose Zoom Original or Zoom Extents to return to a recognizable view.
Thehand pointer returns to the normal AutoCAD crosshairs.