Using a proprietary title block - AutoCAD Tutorial

- [Voiceover] We're now in the next chapter of our AutoCAD Facilities Management 101 Areas course and we're gonna start looking at setting up our facilities drawing. Now we do this in quite a unique way when we're setting up a facilities drawing and there's various reasons for that. One of which is that we like to have the plan, the structural plan, underneath the facilities plan. And we can do that using external references in AutoCAD, which we'll look in a little while. One of the first things you really should do though when you set up your new facilities management drawing is use a proprietary titleblock, so you might have a company titleblock in AutoCAD or a project titleblock in AutoCAD, always get all of that all set up first. It's much quicker and easier to get it done at the beginning rather than then mess around later and try and set it up. Now the reason I started a new drawing is we're gonna reference in the facilities plan, all the structural information like the walls and things, into the facilities management drawing. But before we do that we need to look at using a proprietary title block. So let's get our drawing all set up the way we want it to. Now this particular drawing, once you've downloaded it from your lynda.com Exercise Files, go to the Home tab on the ribbon and go to the Layers first of all, and you'll notice there is an A ANNO TITLEBLOCK layer in there. Make sure you're using that layer, because that's the layer all of your titleblock block will go onto. So we're going to use an AutoCAD block as a titleblock, but before we do that let's just get the drawing ready for that first of all. So the first thing we've done, we've got the layer set up that the block is going to go on. Now we're not gonna put it into the Model tab, we're gonna put it into one of the Layout tabs. So down here, Layout2, right-click on it, and just Delete it, we don't need it right now. And just click on OK to the little dialog box that pops up. Layout1 though, we're going to right-click, and we're going to Rename, and we're going to rename it 00-GND. Now you could use underscores if you want to, so I could go back there and obviously inline with the drawing I might put an underscore there instead. 00_ground, because it is the ground floor plan. Now when you're working in facilities management you always try and do one drawing, one floor. Don't try and put more than one floor on a drawing. Just confuses the issue a little bit, especially in the Model when you've got all the plans of the different floors in the same space. So I'll press Enter there and I've renamed that tab. Now I'm gonna go into that layout tab, the 00 ground tab now, just click on it, and you'll see it's a default AutoCAD sheet with a default viewport. Click on the viewport here, we don't need that, so I'm gonna delete that. So just hit the Delete key. We don't need any viewports at the moment. All we're doing is setting up a titleblock. Now the titleblock I'm going to use is an ISO A one titleblock. So I need to set up the sheet first. So I'm just gonna right-click here now on the tab, like so, and go to Page Setup Manager. And the Page Setup Manager dialog box kicks in and you can see at the moment that all we've got is the 00 ground with the asterisks around it. That means that there is no Page Setup set up for this particular tab yet. So we click on New and we give the Setup a name. I'm going to call this particular Setup ISO A3, 'cause that's the size of the sheet, then a dash, and then Landscape, that's the orientation of the sheet, and then another dash, and then PDF, so that when we plot this particular tab it goes out to a PDF file. I'll click on OK and that brings in the Page Setup dialog box, which looks remarkably like the Plot dialog box, and it does. Because what we're doing, our Page Setup, is all our like preset plotting settings. So Printer plotter, I'm gonna set that now to the DWG To PDF, Paper size, I'm just gonna set that to the ISO A1. So if I come down here, there we go, ISO A1, 841 by 594. And that's in millimeters I hasten to add. What to plot, we're gonna go to Extents, and we're going to Center the plot on the sheet, like that. So can you see, there's my 841 by 594, and we're centering the plot on the sheet. The Scale will be one to one, because my titleblock is also 841 by 594. Plot style table, we'll just set it to the regular default acad.ctb. And just check down here that you've got Landscape as your Drawing orientation. Click on OK and you can see there it is there, ISO A3 Landscape PDF. Select it, double-click on it, and it will apply that to the 00 ground tab in our facilities management drawing. So I click on Close, like so, and there's my sheet all ready to go. What I can do now is go up to here, to Insert on the ribbon, and I want to Insert a block. And the only block in this drawing that you'll find when you download it is the ISO A1 Landscape titleblock. So I click there and I want to insert that, and there it is there floating around on the cross hair. Now the insertion point is going to be zero comma zero, and then press Enter. And you'll see that that puts it in a weird place. Don't worry about that. What you do now is you right-click on the tab, Page Setup Manager, you go in here now, like so, and you Modify your Page Setup. Just switch off Center the plot, switch it back on again, like so, and then OK, and it will say that the page setup you just edited is referenced by layout tabs, which it is, the 00 ground tab, click on Yes, click on Close, and it just centers it. It's just a little quirk within AutoCAD there, because when we were previously setting this up it was probably set to the center and now we're taking it out to 00, which is the bottom left corner. So there's our proprietary titleblock all ready to go in our 00 ground FM drawing.