AutoCAD is a general purpose computer aided drafting application program designed for use on single-user, desktop personal computers and graphic workstations. It was initially developed in the early 1980's by Autodesk Inc., Sausalito, California. It is currently distributed in Australia by Autodesk Australia, now located in Sydney. These notes have been updated to describe Release 12 of that package.
Concepts and definitions
AutoCAD is an interactive drawing system designed to permit a user to construct or edit a drawing on a graphics display screen. To this extent, it is analogous to a wordprocessing program, except that in this case the thing being processed is a drawing. Each drawing is stored on a disk file, and AutoCAD is only able to edit one drawing (or file) at a time. This similarity to word processors is reflected in the fact that the principal functional component of AutoCAD is known as the drawing editor.
Up until Release 10, AutoCAD was essentially a two-dimensional drawing system. Following that release, it now supports a full three-dimensional database. This has had the effect that the features of AutoCAD that support two-dimensional drawing are fully self-contained and can still be used as a 2D system without being concerned with its 3D features. In this course we will focus on the 2D drafting aspects of AutoCAD since that better reflects the way in which this system is generally used in practice at the present time. Several sections in these notes explain how the 3D features have been incorporated into AutoCAD, but provide little detail of the 3D operations.
In order to understand AutoCAD, we must focus on a few specific concepts.
AutoCAD 是一個一般用途的計算機起輔助設(shè)計的軟件，它是為單一使用者，桌面?zhèn)€人計算機和圖形工作站上設(shè)計的。它最初在1980 年代早期由加州的Sausalito 的Autodesk 公司開發(fā)。它現(xiàn)在分布澳洲悉尼的Autodesk。 這些筆記已經(jīng)被更新來描述那一個版本12。
概念和定義
AutoCAD 是一個交互式圖形設(shè)計系統(tǒng),允許一個使用者構(gòu)造或編輯在一個圖形顯示屏上的一幅圖畫。 對這范圍，它與一個 字處理程序是類似的,除了處理一幅圖畫以外。 每幅圖畫被儲存在一個磁盤文件上，而且 AutoCAD 一次只能夠編輯一幅圖畫 ( 或文件)。 這與文件處理器類似,反映AutoCAD 的主要功能圖畫編輯。到版本10, AutoCAD 本質(zhì)上是一個二維空間的圖形系統(tǒng)。 緊跟著版本 10,它現(xiàn)在支持一個完整的三度空間的數(shù)據(jù)庫。 這已經(jīng)有效果,AutoCAD的特征支持二維空間的圖形完全自我包含的,而且能被當(dāng)作一個2D系統(tǒng)而沒有與它的3D立體特征有關(guān)系。在這課程中，我們將會把重心集中在AutoCAD的2D起草方面,因為這更好的反映現(xiàn)在在實際中這系統(tǒng)通常的方法。 這些筆記的一些片斷中,3D特征如何已經(jīng)被AutoCAD整合, 但是并不提供3D操作細節(jié)。 為了了解AutoCAD,我們一定把重心集中放在一些特定的觀念上。