there are two drawing aids in autocad called grid and snap they often work together but you can use them separately from each other as well snap is a toggle setting that is either on or off and you turn this on or off by pressing the f9 button or by clicking on the snap icon in the status bar which is found right here right now it’s off when I click it the icon is highlighted blue
command line will tell you that your snap is on
off one
the snap feature does is it restricts your mouse movements to specific increments on a grid that grid can either be visible or invisible right now my grid is visible you can set these increments to whatever value you need it to be if you need to draw objects at incremental units or factors thereof then snapping is a great way to go it helps you to draw in these increments every time without doubt and without tedious and data entry the snap technique is not very useful though when you are way out or you’re too far away because the farther you’re zoomed out then the more difficult it will be to see where you’re snapping to so it’s a relative thing you’ll have to pay close attention to your coordinates in this case when you snap you are snapping to a defined grid that grid can be made either visible or invisible with a grid feature it’s a toggle so you can turn it off or on by pressing the f7 key grid off or grit on or you can go to the status bar and click on the grid icon again when it’s on the grid icon will be highlighted blue a lot of times I like to work with a grid on because well it’s a grid and it helps me to draw it’s like working with graph paper to a certain degree with snap off i can’t select any of these lines and as I pan around they move they zoom in or zoom out
conduct a region meaning region my screen I can’t do anything with them they’re just a visual aid but that’s okay it’s the same way with drawing on graph paper they’re just the visual aid when the snap feature is turned on it’s also a visual guide not just an aid but it’s a guide and it will tell you where you’re going to snap to as long as you set your grid to be the same increments or units as your snap now to change the snap in the grid settings you need to open up the drafting settings dialog box you can do this by right-clicking in the ocean app or grid icon in the status bar right click and go to the settings are a lot of different tabs in here to set up a lot of different things but what we’re worried about right now is the snap and grid tab if you’re in one of these others or you can’t see it you have buttons over here that will scroll you through all of your different tabs but we want the snap and grid tab you can turn your grid and or snap offer on right by here and you can change the settings throughout in the grid area of the tab you can select the number of units each snap location will be apart you can make the X or the horizontal distance to be the same as the Y or you can make them different you can set up your snap and grid increments to be the same or you can make them different I would tend to try to keep them the same but you don’t have to so right now the way our settings are in this file is that you have a snap point in a grid point at every half of a unit and your grid is drawing a major line these thick lines every five units
now you can change these to show where they’re being displayed or where they’re not in 2d model space 3d model space block editor etc
you can also change it to subdivide below your grid you can follow the dynamic UCS or not so as you see here as i zoom in and out it keeps redrawing the grid with those settings
if you go back to your drafting settings window and you uncheck this box right here the adaptive grid it won’t adapt anymore as you zoom in and out it stays that the size you’ve told it to which is very useful from time to time with snap-on as you can see
cursor automatically snaps
lines on the grid
that’s very useful that’s like drawing on graph paper
I can draw from just about any point on this grid
oh that I’m drawing accurately
the coordinates in the bottom left of my screen
there aren’t any decimals being used because we don’t have our good set up that way
it only goes to zero or point five because we have everything set two point five units
so I guess some decimals are being used in this case but what I mean is it doesn’t go away out like now when I’m free to move around this is what’s happening so when you turn the grid on you can see that a lot of times it has limits and sometimes it doesn’t you can change that by changing your limits I changed my limits
and now i’m going to my draft
you can type in OS and that will take you to the object snap then you just go to the snap and grid tablet and you can tell it to follow the limits so if you want it to go beyond your limits turn this on here but now we’re going to turn it off and I will only show the grid in our limits what are the limits or your limits quite literally will limit where you can draw out there are a lot of different uses for limits and a lot of them aren’t really used as much anymore because of other tools and features that have been put into autocad over the years but you can set your limits by just typing in the word limits and then you can manually type in your coordinates or you can just pick a point and you pick your bottom left corner and then your top right and this is your drawing area this is where the grid will be displayed and this is where you are limited to
many users find the snap and grid features to be annoying however many users find them to be very useful I would agree with both perspectives the ability to control where your crosshairs go without having to think about it is very handy when you’re first learning to use AutoCAD having a grid to help you visualize the length of the location of your drawing objects is also useful learning how big something is on the screen can take some time many users have a hard time adapting to that so having a visual aid could help you in this case eventually and it may take some time though you will be able to understand how big something is on your screen don’t worry if it takes you a while in fact some people never get the hang of it but that’s okay
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