Lesson 3 – Getting started with

In this lesson we will introduce only a few more commands. After this lesson, you should be able to start drawing some useful drawings of your own. With practice it gets easier. Naturally there are some things that CAD will never replace, such as actually seeing a drawing on a drawing board drawn at 1:1. You know exactly what you are going to get. With CAD it is sometimes a little harder to get a real handle on the proportion of things without having a full size plot (hence my work in progress drawing of the Winjeel).

Commands: pan, zoom w, zoom e, zoom p.
These commands are essential for navigating around our drawing. In the first couple of lessons I didn't introduce these, as the scale we were working at was not really necessary anyway.

The pan command

Pan is used to move the current view of our drawing up/down or left/right, much the same manner as using the scroll bars in any other Windows application. The scroll bars can also be used to perform the same function, however if you need to pan diagonally, you would need several clicks of both scroll bars to achieve the same objective. To turn the scroll bars on, go to the view menu and click scroll bars.

When pan is invoked, a pop-up box gives you some options: they are – up, down, page left, page right, page up and page down. This command changes the default cursor to a cursor that looks like a hand. AutoCAD 14 will let you pan and zoom real time. IntelliCAD however doesn't copy this feature. IntelliCAD pans and zooms with a redraw after the desired change of view has been issued. But we shouldn't complain, we are not $4,5000 out of pocket like the users of AutoCAD are ! !

The zoom w command

This command once typed in literally stands for zoom window. Or in plain English 'zoom in. This will let you get closer to work on finer details such as hinges, servo rails etc. Started as all other commands are, you can simply click or select where with known snap codes such as int, end, cent, etc. In the example below, we zoom from viewing the whole engine, to get a closer view of the carbie.

The zoom p command

This one is to go to the previous view. No options needed needed here. Not happy where you have zoomed to, or have finished working or looking in that area, use zoom p to get your previous view back.

The zoom e command

Zoom e means zoom extents, or show me the whole drawing. This is needed when you have done some editing within the drawing and wish to see the entire drawing , or the drawing was saved with a zoomed in view, and you want the entire drawing visible.