Housekeeping in AutoCAD: Keep Those Drawings Shipshape!

SHAUN BRYANT: Welcome to Autodesk University 2023, and welcome to my class, AS601211-- Housekeeping in AutoCAD, or Keeping Those Drawings Shipshape. And we'll talk about that word shipshape in a little while. I'm Sean "CADJedi" Bryant, and I'm the director of CADFM Consultants over in the UK. I'm an Autodesk Expert Elite Member, and you can see all the social media little icons down there at the bottom.

What I do want to jump into first is the Autodesk Safe Harbor Statement which basically says, don't make any purchasing decisions on anything you see in this particular class. It's primarily a legal document just explaining that things might not happen when they should when we're talking about them during the class. So there could be things in there that we talk about that are not quite ready yet, so to speak. So don't make any purchasing decisions, obviously, based on the content of the class.

So I mentioned my name. My name is Sean, and my nickname is CAD Jedi Bryant. And as it says on the slide, who is this guy? I'm the owner and lead consultant of CADFM Consultants over in the United Kingdom-- East Yorkshire, if you know where that is in the UK. I've got my own blog, Not Just CAD, and the LinkedIn newsletter has the same name.

I've written for various publications. I'm a LinkedIn Learning Instructor, an Autodesk Expert Elite. I'm also an Autodesk Certified Instructor and a certified professional with both AutoCAD and Revit. I've been a subject matter expert for Autodesk, Dell, AMD, Certiport, and 3DConnexion to name a few, and I've been speaking at Autodesk University since 2006. I'm also an AU speaker mentor, helping those first-time speakers at AU get their classes just right and ready to shine at Autodesk University.

I've been working with AutoCAD for over 35 years, and with Revit for over 14 years. And I've been known to dabble with a little bit of singing and songwriting, and my music is actually out there on iTunes and other outlets if you want to check it out. And for those of you in the USA, I am known to sound like the Geico gecko and I'm often mistaken for Ricky Gervais's stunt double.

Let's jump into a little bit of background info before we kick off the class in full. You may have heard of the Autodesk 2023 State of Design & Make report, and it features a lot of insights from industry leaders on how things are working in the industry right now.

And I've got a few key takeaways here, and just before I start I'm just going to take a little slurp of water. Drying up a little bit slightly here. And the idea of the Design & Make report was to talk about how things are changing and how things are moving forward, and some key takeaways are that 52% of the respondents changed their day-to-day workflows after the impact of COVID-19.

So over half of the companies spoken to-- they had to change how they worked during the pandemic, and it was discovered that 79% of future growth depends on digital maturity. Now, digitally mature companies are often more prepared to handle change, and obviously those digitally mature companies handled things better during the pandemic as well.

72% of the workforce has evolved in the last three years compared to the last 25 years. That's a quarter of a century when you think about it, and the last three years have been fairly chaotic what with COVID and everything else. So 72% of the workforce has had to evolve to survive, basically.

56% of the companies are now employing workers who lack the necessary skills and they're training them, which is why events such as Autodesk University are so important-- so staff can go to Autodesk University and gain those skills for those companies.

And the other thing that's happening is 70% of the AEC industry companies are struggling to find skilled staff. So that's why they're taking these workers on who lack the skills and are training them up. But the biggest takeaway-- and this is the one for me that really stands out, especially with all the work that I do as an Autodesk Certified Instructor is that 79% of the respondents said that training was important.

So that's why we're here at Autodesk University-- because that training is important to everybody, and the whole idea of Autodesk University is you should be able to walk away with these key takeaways so that you have new knowledge to utilize when you're designing and you're making with the Autodesk software.

Let's have a look at some key words for this particular Autodesk University class. We're looking at AutoCAD. We're looking at our drawings and we want our drawings to be shipshape. Now again, I will explain the word shipshape in a moment. It's a very English word, and as you probably gathered, I'm English.

But we're going to be taking a look at AutoCAD. We're going to be taking a look at standards, layers, text, and dimensions. Now these are four of the key items that allow you to keep those drawings shipshape and neat and tidy, and to use a phrase, Bristol fashion. And I'll explain that again also. It's a very British phrase. Quite old fashioned, but you'll kind of see where it comes from in a moment.

Now a little bit of history for you here. This is my dad. He's called James Collin Bryant. He was an RO2 in the Royal Navy when he served. He was in communications. RO stands for radio operator, by the way. And he served on the HMS Hampshire in Singapore and Malta in 1959-ish. So there's a couple of shots of him serving on HMS Hampshire there.

He looks a tad older now. He's 82 now. Bless him. And basically he taught me the phrase shipshape and Bristol fashion, and I want to go into the history of that a little bit. So I found this fantastic thing online called Wiktionary. I think it's part of Wikipedia. Shipshape is originally a nautical term when you're on a ship, and basically you're being meticulously neat and tidy.

So when you're serving in the armed forces, one of the things you're taught is to be organized, keep things neat and tidy. So for example, my father always taught me to put my laces inside my shoes or my boots. That way they don't get wet and the laces don't rot, which on a ship is something you do as second nature.

Now a synonym of shipshape is shipshape and Bristol fashion. Now there's some little asterisks on the slide there. I'll explain the Bristol fashion thing in a minute, but the whole idea of shipshape is it's neatly and tidily-- meticulously neat and tidy and so on. So you're being meticulous about your drawings, you're being meticulous about AutoCAD, and you're keeping those drawings shipshape.

Now the Bristol fashion bit is really quite interesting. Bristol used to be one of the most prosperous ports of West Coast Britain in the UK, and its ship chandlery was of the highest quality. And basically Bristol in the UK has one of the highest tidal ranges when the tide comes in from the sea. Can go up to 13 meters. That's the variance.

So it's a massive variance between high tide and the low tide. It's the second highest in the world, in fact, and I didn't know this until I started looking all this up for my AU class. Ships moored in the area would be aground at low tide, and because of their keels would fall to one side. So if everything wasn't stowed or tied down in the ship, the results were chaotic and cargo could be spoiled. Hence, it had to be stowed shipshape and Bristol fashion.

So what we're looking at here is we're making sure in our AutoCAD drawings that we're keeping them shipshape and Bristol fashion by stowing everything in the right place neatly, tidily, and meticulously. So we're looking at shipshape, we're looking at Bristol fashion, and what we're going to be doing is checking out our objectives first.

Now, our objectives are listed in the class description. I've broken them down into some items that are a little bit more detailed, basically so that we can go through what we're going to be looking at. So objective number one is our CAD standards. Now you can see there that I've got some standards. I've got BS1192 and 1195. I've also got ISO 13567.

Now they've all happened in succession over time and they've evolved, and we're going to talk about why we need standards. More importantly, why is boring good, which you'll understand later. And we're going to talk about naming philosophies, especially about a lady called Julie that I used to work with many years ago.

Our second objective is all about the layers in the DWG file. Now, we've got layer properties. We can turn our layers on and off. We can freeze them. We can thaw them. We can translate our layers. We can set our layers to utilize the BYLAYER setting as well, which makes life a lot easier. And I'll explain that in a bit.

Our third objective is text. Drawings are useless without text. And when I say text, I say text, not texting. You'll understand what I mean in a minute. And we're going to talk about textiles, how they can be annotative, and more importantly, the consistency of your textiles. That's really important.

And then last but not least, our fourth objective today is dimensions. Now again, dimensions are just fundamental to your drawings. They communicate your design intent. They communicate the sizes of what you're designing. So if you're building a house, the builder needs to know how big the doorways are. If you're designing a widget to go in a car engine, you've got to make sure that the dimensions are right so that it fits in the right hole, or the gasket goes around it.

We're going to talk about what is a dimension with the DIMASSOC variable. We're going to talk about how those annotative dimensions work. We're also going to take a little look at multileader styles and multileaders. Now I put those under Dimensions in the Dimensions category. They are just annotation, but I often tie it all together because a dimension has a dimension style and also a multileader has a multileader style, and the workflow is very, very similar. And you'll see that as we work through it in the class.

So let's take a little look now at objective 1 where we're working with our CAD standards. Now a little bit of an introduction for you. I'm from the UK, so we're going to be looking at typical BS-- British standard-- and ISO-- International Standards Organization standards which are metric. And hey, because I'm from the UK I work with metric all the time. I have worked with imperial as well with various companies that I've worked with, but metric is my second nature so we will be talking about metric standards.

Now that doesn't mean to say that you can't apply this to an imperial standard, say in the USA, for example. Basically what I'm talking about here is why standards are so important, not how you implement those standards. But to give you an idea, when I first started using AutoCAD I started using BS1192. That was the original standard. BS1192 part 5 was what we used to use. And when I was a young drafter we had a copy of that in the office and we all had to adhere to it.

That transitioned into BS1195 part 5, 1998, which was a construction drawing practice standard, and it was a guide for structuring and exchanging CAD data. It's now been withdrawn and the more recent one now is ISO 13567 part 2, 2017. That followed BS1195, and basically what that tells us is, it states that layer names should be divided into fields-- some mandatory and some optional.

Now weirdly enough, BS1192 did the same thing. So all of these three standards have done the same thing, and what I'm going to do today is talk about BS1192 because it's the one I always remember and I'm very fond of. But all three of those standards follow a very similar workflow, a very similar process. And to give you an idea of the number of standards out there, take a look at that little piece of Wikipedia I've put in the slide there.

There's a list of standards there-- the most common ones. BS1192 still sits up there at the top and people do still use BS1192. So it's still around, but there are other standards out there. And you can see we've got Austrian standards in that list. There's a Swiss standard, and so on and so forth. You've got the AIA CAD Layer Guidelines. That's the US one and that's been around for a long, long time. And there's some samples there of standardized layers in that list as well, giving you ideas of how those layer naming philosophies work.

Wikipedia is a great tool for this kind of thing if you need to look something up, by the way. I've used it a lot in my time as a CAD consultant. So I looked up AEC Standards. That was literally all I put into Wikipedia, and that was the list I got. So if you need to look stuff up, it gives you a good point of reference of which standards you might need to look at.

So why do we use a CAD standard? It's all about standardization and consistency. You want everything to be the same. You don't want any outliers there that could cause confusion, that might get read the wrong way, and so on. When you're collaborating, you all need to be speaking the same language. So that's why you need a CAD standard. You all need to be using the same standard as well, which is always a good idea, right?

Communication. You all know what is going on if you're all using the same CAD standards in your drawings in your projects. What that means is everything is standardized. It's boring. It's regular. But that's good. We need it to be boring and regular. Boring is good. Always remember that when you're working with your standards in your AutoCAD drawings. Boring, boring, boring. Good, good, good.

I'll give you an idea of why you should be using a CAD standard. This is all about that lady Julie that I used to work with way back when. When I first set up the company, I was brought into a local government organization. I worked with them for about nine months, and they were transitioning-- to give you an idea of how long ago this was, they were transitioning from AutoCAD release 14 to AutoCAD 2002. So it was quite some time ago. It was actually I think before my children were born as well. However, I digress.

The AutoCAD user Julie was a lovely lady that I worked with. I was training her, I was getting her to understand why we needed CAD standards, and so on. She was self-taught on AutoCAD and she had her own individual layer naming philosophy. You can see it in the slide. Her layers were JULIE001, JULIE002, JULIE003.

Now that's great for Julie. She understands what all those layers do, but no one else did. And slowly but surely we transitioned Julie to use the CAD standard that we developed so that her layers in her drawings were a lot more understandable. That's the exact reason why you should be using a CAD standard-- so that everybody can understand those layers, not just Julie.

So how should we be using a CAD standard? How do we use a standard? How do we get that standard working? Well, we use a standard to make sure that everything is consistent, as I mentioned earlier. But more importantly, if we're using it and we're standardizing and boring is good, how do we make it effective? What makes a CAD standard?

Well, the only way I can get you to understand that is to take you through how a CAD standard is set up. And I'm going to take you through this very briefly. There's a lot more to this. And if you go and look up something like BS1192 or any of the other standards I've mentioned, you'll see that there is a lot that goes into making a CAD standard. So we're going to look at how we're going to use that CAD standard.

Now, I'm the token Brit in the room. I normally am at Autodesk University. So I'm going to use British standard BS1192. As I mentioned, it's very close to my heart. It's the CAD standard that I started using when I first started using AutoCAD, and it's officially used for construction drawing practice-- CDP they called it in the UK. And part 5 of that standard concerns the guide for structuring and exchange of CAD data, so when you're exchanging drawings everybody should be adhering to this particular standard.

Now I am going old school, but this methodology still stands even though the standards have developed over time. This methodology of setting up a drawing name or a layer name is exactly how all the standards work. They just do it ever so slightly differently. So we're going to look at a typical BS1192 file name. Now when you look at that on the screen there, you can see there's a lot of information, and what I've done is I've highlighted it for you.

So anything that is regular text there in a BS1192 file name is mandatory. Anything that's red with a gray background is optional. And you can add other standards and other methodologies to your file name as well. Now all of these letters and numbers look like absolute gobbledygook, and we haven't got a clue what they mean. But the important thing is they all serve a really important purpose and define what is in your particular drawing file.

And that's where we're going to go. We're going to break this down piece by piece so that we know what it all means. And you'll-- [COUGH] excuse me. You'll find that the majority of standards do it in this particular workflow. So PR1 at the beginning of the file name-- that is your project. That can be anything from two to six characters. It's used by all parties to maintain that consistency that I keep talking about.

The next little bit moving across, the XYZ-- I've just called it XYZ-- is the originator. So you can have three to six characters there, and that identifies the organization or company-- the individual organization or company. So that might be Autodesk, for example, to use a company name. We're then moving into the V1 part of the file name-- the volume or system, and that's normally one to two characters.

It's the portion of the work. So if you're working on a small project, that might actually be just something like 1. But if you've got things such as an atrium or a mezzanine, it might be A1 for the atrium, M1 for the mezzanine, and so on. And what you would do there is you'd make sure that there's something written down as part of the project documentation explaining what those volumes are and what those V1s and M1s and everything else actually stand for.

The next part of the file name is easy to understand. It's the level or the location. So that's two characters. In this particular file name case, it's 01, which in the UK would be potentially the first floor. So you might have typically-- GF we have in the UK quite often-- ground floor. 00 in the USA, for example, and 01 and 02, et cetera. It all depends. And often in the USA you don't even have the 00. It depends on what standard you're working to. What project you're working on. But most USA standards would have the ground floor as 01, for example.

The next part is the information type. So I've got that as M3. M3 in BS1192 means it's a 3D model. DR is a 2D drawing. BQ is bill of quantities. There are other abbreviations as well. I've just given you some examples there. And then the A is the role code. Now that's one character, and there is a massive list of these. I've just put two there. A is for architect, B is for building surveyor, and it goes on. So S would be structural, and so on.

And then last but not least you have the 0001, and that is literally a number. That is your sequential numbering with leading zeros for your drawing numbers. So you'd have drawing 0001, 0002, et cetera, and it goes onwards.

So those are your mandatory elements in your CAD standard. And as I said, this is for BS1192 for a file name. It's not a layer name or anything like that. It's a file name. But the workflow, the process for a layer would be incredibly similar as well. And also in other standards-- doesn't matter which country you're in, there will be a standard somewhere and it will have a very similar workflow to this. A very similar structure.

Little takeaway tip for you though, which I've come across so many times, especially when I was working with BS1192-- is you need to remember that you might have several different companies, organizations working on a larger project. A larger project-- you'd have an architect, a structural engineer, mechanical engineer. It goes on. There's a big list. If that's the case, the second code-- the originator code defines the individual company or organization. So that's your XYZ. So that's defining the company or organization. So you might, for example, have there-- that XYZ might be something like ADSK for Autodesk.

The role code defines the function of the company or the organization. So for example, you might have the architects company name where it's XYZ, and then the A defines that they are the architect. Make sure that you don't get these two confused. If you do, that's when it gets really complicated and really chaotic. And I've been on projects where that has been confused, and trust me, it's a mess that you don't ever want to get into. So make sure that the originator code and the function role code are maintained on a project when it comes to file names especially.

Let's take a little look at those optional elements, the ones with the gray background and the red text. Now the first one there looks a bit like a time code. It could be 3:05 in the afternoon and 15 seconds. It's not. It's what they call a classification status. Now again, there are so many classifications out there in the world when it comes to working in my industry, the AEC industry, and these ones could be UNICLASS ones. So UNICLASS 1.4 or UNICLASS 2015.

The S1 bit is the suitability status. Now typically on anything that is preliminary, previous to construction, would be WIP. I've got it as S1 at the moment, which is stage 1 construction, but normally that would be WIP until construction. Then you'd go stage 1, stage 2-- so S1, S2, et cetera.

And then the PO2 is the revision status. So that in this case could be Preliminary 02. You might have Preliminary 01. When it goes to construction, obviously they would change to C01, C02, et cetera. And again, it's all classifications that allow you to identify the stage that that drawing, that file is actually at.

Now again, I'm being very subjective here. All of these standards would conform to a relevant project, company, or national standard depending on what you're using. And they would normally be built into your AutoCAD drawing template files-- your DWTs so that any time you start a new drawing, you name the file-- in this case as you can see, according to the standard, and all of your layers, your title blocks, et cetera conform to the standards with the layering and everything else.

So ideally in a perfect world environment, you wouldn't have to worry about the standard, but you would need to be fully aware of the standard to make sure everything follows that workflow, that file naming, that layer naming, and so on. OK, that's covered our CAD standards. That's objective number 1 complete.

Let's jump into objective 2, Working with Layers. Now layers are completely fundamental to your AutoCAD drawings. They're always there, they need to be used, and as per objective number 1, we talked about layers, file names, how they all have to be standardized. But also you need to think about managing these layers and how they work. Let me just grab a little slurp of water. Drying up again.

And we need to start thinking about functions within AutoCAD that allow us to work with our layers effectively. So now we're getting into that shipshape and Bristol fashion. We're tying everything down, we're being meticulous, we're keeping it neat and tidy, so we need to think about that good old command called purge. Now you can just type purge if you want to. It's also on the application menu under drawing utilities. And I just want you to take a little look at what's on the slide there.

Purge allows you to remove unused named items such as block definitions and layers from the drawing. How many times have you had a drawing from a third party, and there's loads and loads of loads of layers in there that you don't need? It's a perfect application of the purge command, right? You're removing the layers, and in that you're also reducing your file size. The more things you can take out of the DWG, the better.

Now it's not just about removing the layers with purge, though. You can locate blocks. You can find the blocks for removal and then remove the unwanted block layers as well. So you'll notice there in purge, I've gone to the non-purgeable items. Now there's a really nice function in purge now. So you'll notice there-- can you see in the purge dialog I've gone to non-purgeable items and I've selected a block in the list-- bolt side view. You can see a little preview of it.

And if you look down there, there's one insertion in that particular drawing. But if you look at that lower red arrow there, it's a little blue icon. If I click on that, it will find me all of those blocks in my drawing, and it'll basically take me to the drawing and they'll all be selected. What that means is if I don't want that block, I can delete them all and then I cannot only purge the block, I can also purge out the unwanted block layers, keeping my drawing shipshape and Bristol fashion. I'm getting rid of all the stuff that I don't want in the drawing, which is reducing the file size. It's optimizing my DWG.

Now, properties-- again, so important in your AutoCAD drawings. Properties are really important, but also is managing those properties. Now one of the most important properties that you're ever going to manage is your layer properties. There are other properties of objects in your AutoCAD drawings, but if you jump to the Home tab on the ribbon, go to the Layers panel, and hit the Layer Properties icon, it will open up the Layer Properties Manager.

Now there's some tools here. And again, I might be teaching you how to suck eggs a little bit. You might know how to do this already. But a lot of people don't know how to do it, and as a consultant I find that quite frustrating because the Layer Properties Manager should be fundamental to anybody's AutoCAD knowledge.

So for example, you've got the option with layers to turn them on or off in your drawing so that you can either see them or not. But you can also freeze them or thaw them as well. The two functions visually do the same thing. They hide the layers you don't want to see. Now, why do they do that?

If you turn your layers on and off, the layers are still considered when the drawing is regenerated when you open it up. If you freeze the layers, they are not considered when the drawing is regenerated when you open up the file. So it means that your drawing will open up faster, especially if it's a really busy drawing. So if you want your drawing to open quicker, freeze the layers you don't want to see.

Now, Viewports are really important in a drawing as well, especially in your layouts. The Viewports layer should not plot. And you'll notice-- look at the little bottom arrow there. There's a little plot icon in your Layer Properties Manager. If you click on it, that little red symbol will appear. It looks like a no entry sign, and it's basically letting you know that the Viewports layer will not plot if that little red symbol is displayed. Great for keeping those layouts looking neat, tidy and shipshape.

Now there's another layer there that I've highlighted. It's the Defpoints layer. Now that will appear automatically in your layer list as soon as you start placing dimension objects on the drawing. Now, it never plots because it basically is the layer that the origin points of your dimensions go on. But it should not be used for text annotation that you don't want to plot. It should be used for dimensions only.

If you want a layer for text annotation that needs to be hidden, what you need to do is do it like the Viewports. Create a layer and hit that Do Not Plot so the little red no entry symbol appears. Don't use Defpoints. Keep Defpoints separate for dimensions only, because you never know. You might get rid of all your dimensions and then you've got no Defpoints.

Think about that for a moment. Somebody might then purge the Defpoints layer out of the drawing, and all of that text that you've neatly placed everywhere hoping it's not going to be seen disappears off the drawing. So just be aware of that. It could get erased, it could get purged, and so on. Now bear in mind, obviously you've got to erase all of that text on the Defpoints layer first before you purge it, so that could happen as well. But you've got to make sure that you're using the right layers for the right functions in your drawings. Defpoints is for dimensions. It's not for text.

Let's take a little look now at more properties. We're going to take a look in the Properties panel. Now a lot of people don't use this panel in AutoCAD. They just carry on creating stuff. Putting stuff on drawings. It's a really useful panel. Now there's a few little settings on here. Again, I'm not going to go into too much depth. We haven't got long. So I could probably actually write a book on object properties quite easily in AutoCAD.

But the Match Properties button you see there on the Properties panel-- great for matching properties, including layers, from one object to another. So here's a trick for you. If you're working on a project and you're not sure of, let's say, layer properties for a particular thing that you've drawn but you know it's got to go on a layer that is the same as the object to the left or the right in the drawing, you can use Match Properties and just match things across. So you can pick existing objects, select their properties, and apply them to the new objects you've placed in the drawing. It's incredibly useful if you're working on a drawing that you're not familiar with.

Color, Line Type, and Line Weight. They are the three mantras that you should be looking at all the time in your AutoCAD drawings. You should be looking at color, line type, and line weight, especially relating it back to the standards, but also more importantly, making sure that everything is the correct color, line type, and line weight.

Now you'll notice in the Properties panel that you can individually change and manage those object properties. If you look at the moment, you can see that a linear dimension there has been selected and the properties of that dimension are all by layer. I'll go to BYLAYER in a minute, but you can change any of those properties-- the color, line type, and line weight individually. So that then means they'll have their own individual color, line type, and line weight away from the color, line type, and line weight of the original layer that they were placed on.

Now you could work that back the other way as well. People often just click on an object, go to the Properties panel, and change the color. Now you might want that color to be the layer color, so you need to go to the Color option there where the little red square is and change it to BYLAYER. Then it adopts the layer color. That's really important as well. So it ensures that those object properties are adopted from the layer definition.

And again, you might do this and realize the objects aren't on the right layer as well. They're not the right color, and so on. So potentially this might be a method of finding layers that are superfluous and not needed. You can then jump into purge again and purge those layers out of the drawing, again refining the drawing, optimizing it, keeping it shipshape, keeping that file size down.

Now another thing that happens, and this used to happen to me a lot as a CAD manager. You'd get those third-party DWG files in. Now this is in the CAD standards panel in AutoCAD. Let me just refresh my water. Getting a little bit dry again. And we're going to take a little look at the Layer Translator. Now this allows you to map your third-party layers in a drawing to existing layers using the Map tool. You can see it there in the dialog box on the right. It's where that red arrow is.

So what you can do is you can create new layers and map existing layers to new layers conforming to your standards, or you can bring in layers from existing drawing templates using that Load button you can see on the dialog as well. So this slide shows an existing group of layers on the left, and you're translating them using the Layer Translator.

So if you look at that little section of the dialog at the bottom, you can see the old layer name and the new layer name. Now I haven't really gone to town with layer names, but you can see in the left-hand graphic there that the center lines are on the center layer. In the layer translation mappings, I'm taking that center layer to the center lines layer and I'm changing things like the line type, the line weight, and so on. Same with the Hatching layer. That's going to become Hatch. And the Hidden layer is going to become Hidden Detail.

And the colors are also changing as well, you'll notice. That everything's changing from the existing drawing to your drawing so that it's standardized and set up the way that you want it to be. It's another really underrated, underused tool in AutoCAD. So if you get the chance to check it out go and have a look at your CAD standards panel and check out your Layer Translator. It's incredibly easy to use, and all you've got to do is look up Layer Translation in your AutoCAD help if you're not sure about how it's going to work.

Last but not least, we're going to jump into using layer 0. Now I'm hoping that most of you have been told, don't draw things on layer 0. It's the default AutoCAD layer. But there is one thing you should draw on layer 0, and that's your blocks. So when you go to that Insert tab and use the Blocks panel and click on Create block, just before you select all the objects including objects and attributes, put all of them onto layer 0 before you create that block.

Then, before you create that block as well, set your current drafting layer. Make sure the layer that you want the block to go on is current. So if you look at these two little graphics here, I've put in the left-hand graphic the items that make up the bolt and the two attributes, all on the 0 layer. I've then changed the current drafting layer to Details, and when I create that block or insert that block now, it's inserted and it adopts the current drafting layer.

So you need to say the attributes have become metric ISO because it's a metric ISO bolt, and it's a side view of the bolt. But if you create everything in your block and put it all on layer 0 first and then create the block, every time you bring that block into your drawing it will always adopt the current drafting layer. It saves you having to go around and find all those blocks and change their layer properties. So you're actually going, oh OK. They're all--

So you might create a block of a chair. Make sure that Chairs is the current layer. When you bring the blocks in, they're all on the layer Chairs already. It allows you to work smarter, not harder. You're getting things right first time rather than bringing in all the chairs perhaps on the Windows layer in error and then having to go and find them all and change their layer name. It's much, much easier that way.

So that ends objective 2, where we've been working with our layers. We're going to take a look now at objective 3, and we're going to work with text. Text is absolutely fundamental to AutoCAD drawings because without the text, obviously we're not going to be able to tell anyone about anything on our drawings. We can't communicate our design intent.

Now when we're working with text, obviously when you place text on the drawing you're going to use the Text commands, right? That's understandable. Hence the Text-- obviously-- subtitle there. So when you're placing your text using the single line text command which is just T-E-X-T, I normally use that for things like labels and title blocks.

You've also got multiline text in AutoCAD-- MTEXT. I tend to use that for things like notes, columns, and big areas of text on a drawing. Ideally you want it to be annotative. That's the preferred option. But when you're doing things like labels and title blocks, you might not make them annotative. They might be a fixed height, for example.

And you can also place them as non-annotative as well, which is what I've just explained. So it depends on how you're working it. If you want to work to scale, you can make the text styles annotative. They can also be non-annotative as long as that's not important and they don't have to be a specific size.

Dimensions-- they also use text. The text is built into the dimension style. The dimension style should be annotative preferred, definitely, and I'll explain that later. But also you can have non-annotative dimension styles as well. Now it tends to be the norm that they are annotative, and you'll see that when we start talking about dimensions later.

And another piece of text that you might often use is on a multileader. You might have a multileader with text, and it's built into the multileader-- the MLEADER style. Again, it's preferred that they're annotative but they can be non-annotative as well.

So I joked earlier about text. I'm not talking about text on a phone, as you can see in the left hand graphic there. I'm talking about text on a drawing. So to give you an analogy here, the text on the phone is text. It's conversational text, as you can see. Text on a drawing is things communicating what is on the drawing. The dimensions, the section view, the side view. So that's where you want to be working with your text, making sure it communicates your drawing.

Let's take a little look at annotative versus non-annotative. I'm just going to refresh my water. Apologies. And what we want to do there is see why annotative versus non-annotative works. If you take a look at the textile dialog there, you can see that the textile-- the current one is-- notes layout 3.5 millimeters.

Now that Section view text is not that notes one. If I want to make the labels model 15 millimeters current, the one highlighted in blue, I would select it, click on Set Current and I could then place that text that says Section View. And that's just a label, so it's going to be that 15 millimeters high in the drawing. And you can see just visually that it is 15 millimeters high when you look at that dimension of 30 there, for example.

So that's just using some regular non-annotative text. It probably would be single line text as well because it's just a little text label. What about this text up here, though, in the Dimension style? Well, you can see that all looks nice and consistent. Again, consistency, shipshape, Bristol fashion.

But also more importantly, it's all the same size and it all looks very regular. That's because you've put that text into a annotative dimension style. So you see the name of the dimension style there. It's Training-Anno. And the text height is always going to be that 3.5 that is arrowed because it's utilizing what they call the annotation scale to make sure that that aligns with your Viewport scale in your layers.

So you'll notice that the dimension style is using a text style called DIMs model. And if you look at those textiles in the dialog on the right, the only annotative textile there is the default one-- the annotative default one with the little blue symbol. None of those other textiles are annotative. However, the dimension style is annotative, so any text in that dimension style will also become annotative.

So you can leave that text height in the dimension style at 3.5. The dimension text is annotative because it's part of the annotative dimension style. And again, you've got consistent text heights, especially in your Layout Viewports because they're all scaled. And when we start talking about annotation scaling later in the class, you'll get how that works.

I mentioned multileaders as well. They're incredibly similar to the dimension side of things. So again, we've got the section view. We're using the label there. That's using the labels model 15 millimeters-- the non-annotative text. But you can see we've got a little leader there telling us that we have a slotted hole in the section view. So that's a section view of a metal plate with a slotted hole in it.

So as you can see there, the slotted hole has the multileader and it uses multi-line text-- MTEXT. But again, notice the multileader style is annotative. You can see it's called Training-Anno. I always put that Anno at the end, and again, that's consistency. I'm making sure that everybody knows that it's an annotative multileader style. I'm not like Julie where that multileader style might be called JULIE001, one for example. Everybody knows it's used for training and it's annotative.