Expert Training

Overview

In This Chapter

• Making the case for CAD standards

• Choosing from existing standards

• Rolling your own standards

• Taking advantage of cool standards tools

If you’ve ever worked with other people to create a multi-chapter, visually complex, frequently updated text document, then you probably understand the importance of coordinating how everyone works on the parts of the document. Even if you’re someone who churns out documents from your one-person office or lonely cubicle, you probably try to ensure a reasonably consistent look and feel in similar documents. You employ consistent fonts, the same company logo, and the same paper size in most documents — or if you don’t, you probably at least think that you should!

CAD exacts similar demands for reasonable consistency, only more so:

• Most companies would like to take pride in the clarity and consistency of their drawings. Sloppy drawings with randomly varying text heights and lineweights don’t reflect well on you and make the drawings harder to read.

• CAD drawings that don’t conform with some logically consistent scheme usually are harder to edit and to reuse by others who work on the project and by you when you work on other projects.

This stuff is important enough in CAD that it has a special name: CAD standards. Those people compulsive enough to fret about it all the time and sadistic enough to impose their fretting on others also have a special name: CAD managers. This chapter won’t turn you into a CAD manager — a reassurance you’re probably grateful for — but it does introduce the most important CAD standards issues. This chapter also suggests some ways to come up with your own simple CAD standards, in case you’re going it alone and don’t have the benefit of a ready-made company or project CAD standards document to guide you. The chapter ends with an overview of AutoCAD tools that can help you comply with and check conformity to CAD standards.