From the course: Learning AutoCAD (2020)

Creating a simple title block - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: Learning AutoCAD (2020)

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Creating a simple title block

- [Instructor] We're starting a new chapter now in our learning AutoCAD course. And it's all about communicating your design intent. So you should recognize the drawing in front of you. It is a replica of what we created in the previous chapter. But we've saved it as designintent.dwg and you can download it from the library to follow along with the videos. See you have your dimensions using the dimension style, your multi-line text and single line text using your text style, and your AutoCAD table. And what we're going to do, we're going to take our information now and communicate that design intent using a layout tab, a title block, and some scaled view ports and some annotation scaling as well. So first things first, we need to create some new layers for our title block, our little border that we're going to use. So home tab on the ribbon and into layer properties. That'll open up the layer properties manager. Click on the new layer icon, and the first new layer will be title block, like so. If you press the Comma key, it will automatically create another new layer and we'll call that one title text. It's always good to have a separate title text layer so that it doesn't get mixed up with your regular text in your AutoCAD drawings. What we're going to do there is change the color of those layers so that they don't all merge into the other layers. As you can see there's a lot of red layers there. So title text, we're going to change that color to color 30 like so. And also title block, we'll change that one to color 30 as well to match like so. And then you can see we're differentiating with colors just to differentiate the objects that we have on our AutoCAD drawings. I'm going to double-click on the little sheet of paper there next to title block to make title block the current drafting layer. I'm then going to close the layer properties manager. And as you can see in the layers panel now title block is the current drafting layer. I'm just going to pan across little bit to the left so I got some space to work in. I'm going to go to the draw panel and click on the flyer here and select rectangle. I'm going to click for the first corner point and drag upwards to the right like so. And then I'm going to type in the values that I need which are 420 Comma 297. As soon as I do that a press Enter, it creates a rectangle that is 420 by 297. That is the size of an iso A3 sheet of paper. And as you can see, there's no way you could get your bolting plate onto that sheet of paper. That's why we use scale view ports which we'll cover in a moment. So I'm going to zoom in on the title block here like so. I'm then going to go to the offset command on the modify panel. The offset distance will be 15 + Enter like so. And I'm going to select the rectangle I've created. Now you'll notice the rectangle I've selected goes like a sort of purple color and the orange line, the title block layer color, goes in or out. If that orange rectangle is outside, it means you've gone the wrong direction. You need to go inside because that purple line represents your sheet of paper. You do not want to go outside that. So your orange line should be inside. Now that's a new feature on newer versions of AutoCAD but from a visual perspective, it makes life a lot easier. So click inside with the orange line inside like that. They both go orange again and Enter to finish. So there's our nice, simple title block. What we're going to do now is select all of it. So I'm going to pick a point over here with the crosshair, click once, and drag the blue window so it goes across everything. Can you see that? And click again. It will now select both of the rectangles. It's then a case of right-clicking and going to clipboard and selecting copy with base point. What we'll do there is use a base point and copy it to the Windows clipboard within AutoCAD. Use this corner here. When you see it go green, ignore the stretch vertex, add vertex, remove vertex. Just left-click once. And that means you're using that bottom left corner as the base point to copy. Hit Escape a couple of times now. And what we're going to do now is click on the layout one tab, bottom left corner here like so. That'll take us into our layout. Now our layouts are where we place our view ports and our title box to communicate our design intent. But AutoCAD has created a default view port using the current drafting layer. So we can click on the edge of that and just delete it so that we've just got the sheet of paper. It's then right-click clipboard and you'll notice there that we don't have paste. This sometimes happens with AutoCAD, so what can we do? Well we use the keyboard shortcuts, nice and easy. Hit Escape a couple of times and just use Control + V and there's your title block there. Keyboard shortcuts can always override anything and they're very quick and easy to use so it's Control + C, Control + V, Control + X, Control + Z, et cetera. And we use them all the time in other Windows-based products as well. If you don't see that paste in the clipboard commands, just do a Control + V, use the keyboard shortcut. Now specify insertion point 0 Comma 0 like that. Press Enter and you'll see that your title block has now dropped onto your sheet of paper. If you zoom out though, you'll see that your title block is actually bigger than your sheet of paper. Please don't worry about that. What we're going to do in the next video is create a page setup that will make sure that all of this is defined correctly with our sheet the right size behind our little drawing border title block.

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