Your AutoCAD Tool Kit
Table 11-1 lists AutoCAD's most-frequently-used editing commands. It shows the tool icons found on the Ribbon, the classic toolbar, and the classic menu, and it gives the official command name with corresponding alias (where one exists) for the typists in the room. Ribbon buttons are on the Home tab's Modify panel in the Drafting & Annotation workspace. In the AutoCAD Classic workspace, look for these commands on the Modify or Modify II toolbar and Modify menu.
The ARRAY command has undergone a massive revision in AutoCAD 2012 — so much so that it hardly qualifies as a Modify command anymore. I cover the new associative array feature in Chapter 18. However, I think there's still a need for simple arrays — that is, copies of objects in regular patterns — so I explain how to do those (and it's just a little more difficult than it used to be) in this chapter. The icons and input locations for the four Array commands shown Table 11-1 run the new associative array commands which I cover in Chapter 18; I include them here because they're still grouped with the other Modify commands.
Table 11-1 AutoCAD's Modify Commands
Whether you start an AutoCAD editing command by clicking a Ribbon button or typing a command name or alias, in almost all cases AutoCAD prompts you for points, distances, and options in the command window. Read the prompts during every step of the command, especially when you're figuring out how to use a new editing command. Otherwise you're unlikely to complete the command successfully.
AutoCAD's Dynamic Input system displays command options at the crosshairs. When you see a Dynamic Input tooltip with a down-arrow icon, press the down-arrow key on the keyboard to display the command options. You then can use the mouse to select an option (see Figure 11-1). Pressing the up-arrow key displays previous input.
As I describe in Chapter 7, maintaining precision when you draw and edit is crucial to good CAD work. If you've used a drawing program and are accustomed to moving, stretching, and otherwise editing objects by eye, you'll need to suppress that habit when you edit in AutoCAD. Nothing ruins a drawing faster than eyeball-editing, in which you shove objects around until they look okay, without worrying about precise distances and points.
Figure 11-1: Choosing command options from the Dynamic Input menu.
Users of Windows Paint and other bitmap drawing programs will be familiar with the concept of “nudging” — selecting some objects and using the arrow keys on your keyboard to move them a certain number of pixels horizontally or vertically. For better or worse, AutoCAD has joined the nudging party. Now you can move objects a pixel's-worth this way or that by holding down Ctrl and pressing an arrow key. Whether that's a good thing or not is debatable. In this book I try to teach you tried-and-true precision drafting techniques, and moving objects by the pixel instead of by real-world units is the opposite of precise. It might be okay to move a piece of text by nudging it, but you should never move actual drawing geometry that way.