Autocad®: Secrets Every User Should Know

Chapter 6. Plotting

Remember the AutoCAD days of yore? It took days to set up a plotter and hours to plot out a complex drawing. Pens ran out of ink minutes before the end of a job. Plotters seemed to think for themselves when determining the location of the end of a sheet.

Happily, those days are gone. Plotting these days causes far fewer headaches, and in more and more cases you can skip the process altogether. Many designs from AutoCAD exist to communicate directly with a machine that makes parts—from microchips to logs for log homes. As a result, more and more users are distributing only electronic versions of their drawings, often as DWF or PDF files, and using them effectively without ever touching a sheet of paper. We'll always need to lay ...