I need a book on how to run AutoCAD R2011. We're all working off ancient knowledge of R12 (one drafter had a few months on R2007...) They've changed so many things, and nothing works the way it did... I'm not convinced it works at all, but we need to be able to run it. Who's written a good "How To Choke Cooperation From AutoCAD R2011" book. One thing that disturbs me greatly is, if I ask for a Leader Dimension from the keyboard, I get different settings than if I ask for the same Leader Dimension using the Icon, and different again if I ask for a Leader Dimension from the Ribbon... The text styles seem to be different between "Text", Dtext" and "Mtext", and we're having a lot of other wonky behavior. I hate to rant, and I said I'd no longer besmirch the skillset of the morons at AutoDesk, but is this REALLY how everyone WANTS this product to function???
@Anonymous wrote:
... it came bundled with Inventor.... (besides, of course, the client wants if done in AutoCAD).
Draftsight uses the DWG format, so as far as the client goes, he'll get what he expects. Escpecially as you have 2011 Acad, and can verify that the resulting draftsight dwg is valid in 2011 Acad .
@Anonymous wrote:
... it came bundled with Inventor.... (besides, of course, the client wants if done in AutoCAD).
AutoCAD Mechanical can be run as vanilla AutoCAD.
OP the best way to start Nilla CAD is through the start --> programs menu and click on the AutoCAD launch icon, instead of the Mechanical one. This is because some of the commands in Mechanical are different than in Nilla CAD, and if you launch Mechanical and change the profile, the Mechanical versions of the commands would still be active otherwise.
Next, you can set MENUBAR to 1 so you at least have pulldown menus. As you discovered, command line entry still works. Some basic things are that you draw in 1:1 in modelspace, you arrange scaled views of your model on a layout tab (where you have your border and annotation), you can make as many layout tabs as you like, and you should lock your viewports once you have their scales set.
You should read up on this, as well as annotation objects, CANNOSCALE, and multileaders. Things might just start making sense, and when ready you can come back any time for more advice 🙂