Chapter 17

Making “Smart” Drawings with Parametric Tools

Don't let the term parametric drawing scare you. Parametric is a word from mathematics, and in the context of AutoCAD drawings, it means that you can define relationships between different objects in a drawing. For example, you can set up a pair of individual lines to stay parallel or set up two concentric circles to maintain an exact distance between each other no matter how they may be edited.

Parametric drawing is also called constraint-based modeling, and you'll see the word constraint used in the AutoCAD Ribbon to describe sets of tools. The term constraint is a bit more descriptive of the tools you'll use to create parametric drawings because, when you use them, you are applying a ...

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