Drafting Tools - Snap and Grid

We've got snap and grid in AutoCAD. Let's talk about snap and grid. Let's see how we can use it and why we would use it. Snap restricts the cursor movements to specified intervals. That is handy. Lines will have a specific length. Still. If you're using object snaps than you can pick a point that is not on an interval that has been specified. We'll talk about object snap later. With grid switched on dots are displayed in the screen. The dots help to visualize distances. Often the grid interval is the same as the snap interval. That is important. You can have grid dots displayed in the screen. Now you want to print your drawing. The dots are not printed. OK. We know what snap and grid are. But we want to know more. We want to know how we can set the intervals and how we can switch it on and off. Let's start with setting the intervals. There are two ways for doing that. Whatever way you choose. You do it over the Drafting Settings dialog box. Click on Tools in the menu bar. A pull down menu shows up. In the pull down menu click on Drafting Settings. The Drafting Settings dialog box is displayed. There are four tabs in the Drafting Settings dialog box. The Snap and Grid tab is in front. That's exactly what we want. In the dialog box we see two check boxes and we see four areas. The checkboxes can be used for switching on or off snap and grid. Let's have a look at the Snap area and the Grid area. First the Snap area. In that area you can enter values for the spacing. You can enter a value for the X spacing and you can enter a value for the Y pacing. The spacing set the interval I was talking about. There is more you can do in that area. You can enter an angle, an X base, and a Y base. The angle gives the angle of the snap intervals. Most of the time you do not change the angle. You leave the angle at zero. But the X base and the Y base. What's that? The X base and the Y base gives the starting point of the snap. As before. Do not change it. Leave it as it is. At zero. You now know how you can do the settings for the snap. You do it in the Snap area of the Drafting Settings dialog box. But we can also do something with the settings of the grid. That is done in the Grid area of the dialog box. This time we can do less. We can only change the X spacing and the Y spacing. We cannot change the angle or the X base and Y base of the grid. This is what is done most of the time. Most of the time the spacing for the grid is the same as the spacing for the snap. That is what is happening. The grid follows the snap settings for angle and the X base and Y base. So there is no need to change those settings. This is what we now saw. You can do the settings of the snap and the grid in the Drafting Settings dialog box. And you can switch them on and off. Before I continue. I must tell you about the third area in the Drafting Settings dialog box. It is the Snap style and type area. For the snap type we can set Grid snap and we can set PolarSnap. If we go for a Grid snap type then e can select a rectangular snap or an isometric snap. If you're creating isometric drawings, then you want to go for an isometric snap. The snap will have the isometric angles. I'm not going to talk about PolarSnap now. I will do that later. I will do that as we're talking about Polar Tracking. In the next article. But there is another way. Look at your screen. Do you see the status bar? In the status bar there are two buttons. In the status bar there is the Snap button and there is the Grid button. You can click on the buttons. To have snap and grid switched on and off. Something else you can do with the buttons. You can right click them. If you do a short cut menu is displayed. If you right click the Snap button then you'll find the following options in the shortcut menu: -PolartSnap On -Grid Snap On -Off -Settings If you right click on the Grid button then you'll find the following options in the shortcut menu: -On -Off -Settings You can imagine where the on and off options stand for. Those options can be sued to switch snap and grid on or off. But we already saw. There is a quicker way. We can also click on the Snap and Grid buttons in the status bar. In fact. There is another quick way. You can press the F7 function key to switch grid on or off. And you can press the F9 function key to switch snap on or off. Oh. In the shortcut menu under the Snap button you also see the PolarSnap On option. As I said before. We'll talk about it alter. But there is the Settings option in the shortcut menus under the Snap button and the Grid button. Click on that option. If you do the Drafting Settings dialog box is opened. We already have seen what can be done in the Drafting Settings dialog box. But this is what we now know. Using the shortcut menu under the Snap and Grid button. That is a quicker way to open the Drafting Settings dialog box. This is it for today. Now you know everything that you need to know about snap and grid. Tomorrow we're going to talk about polar tracking. See you tomorrow.