I understand how to determine a drawing scale factor, but I can't find where to input the drawing scale factor into AutoCad. I see PC as a very powerful Illustrator with drafting tools. The owner of PowerCADD seems to have a chip on his shoulder with Acad. How absurd! They are simply tools used to complete a task.
The idea that your designs will be better on a Mac and/or PowerCADD is what I am laughing at. I never said PowerCADD was inferior or worse (if so not what I meant). Played with it several times on the co-workers Macs. I used to love flying Cherokees and Tomahawks, before I had kids and still had time and money, but I've never flown a Cub. Make sure everything fits into a 88' x 136' rectangle, then set the scale to 1/8" = 1' when you plot. It's something like working in Paperspace, without the complications of setting up viewports, etc.ĪutoCAD has extra power for large groups working on large projects, but the added complexity that comes from this power often makes doing simple drawings more cumbersome than it needs to be.įlyingal, be sure that scale factors in your dimension definitions are all set to 1, and that units are consistant (there are many places to accidently change these without realizing it). Lettering, dimension arrows, etc., are real-world size, so you don't have to change styles and letter heights. The main difference is that the scale is set when you start drawing, rather than when you plot. When drawing to scale, you still draw full size, but the computer keeps track of the scale. When I am drawing in CAD, I have always thought in full size, whether the program uses a full size model, like Generic CAD or AutoCAD, or is prescaled like PowerCADD. I have been using AutoCAD in my present job for just over a year, and also use Visual CADD (a Windows version of Generic CAD) when I want to draw something quickly. In my last job I used PowerCADD for 4 years. I learned CADD using Generic CAD, just before Autodesk bought it and ran it into the ground.