Zoom & Pan Individual email and remote connection support £24 per month Imagine a 4ft x 3ft easel, on which paper is clipped. Then imagine a designer sitting on a chair with pencil and rubber. Many years ago CAD drawings were produced on these drawing boards. So given this large space on which to design, how can a smaller computer screen do the same job? The answer lies in CAD's Zoom and Pan functions.
The Zoom function allows you magnify a small part of your drawing. That's magnify not changing the size.
Try this, move your mouse wheel backwards and forwards a little.
This is hardware zoom
Push your mouse wheel down and move your mouse.
This is hardware pan Stop panning and zooming for a moment, then double click the mouse wheel If you experiment with the speed of your double which is a windows setting, you will find that the objects drawn will expand to fill your screen.This is hardware zoom extents
Note that your mouse pan function may stop moving at some point. Also at some point you may find circles and arcs of doors for example appear as straight lines instead of rounded circles.
The answer to both these situations is to type RE, short cut key for REGEN command. Additionally CAD software has it's own software zoom command
Type Z short cut key for the zoom command.Look for an area of your screen to be magnified Create a box around that area with 2 left mouse clicks That box will become your full screen You can repeat what is the zoom window command many times and still see your CAD drawing
The software Zoom command also has a Zoom extents option. This is often used in training as it avoids the double mouse click speed issues.
What if Zoom extents results in a very small image, perhaps at the bottom left corner of your screen?
This can happen for a number of reasons. You could have created a copy or an offset at a value so large that it's display on Zoom extents results in the above.
Zoom extents - small drawing solution Think "Good data" and "Bad data".
On some software right mouse whilst command line is clear - pick clipboard then copy with base point If the variable MENUBAR has been changed to a value of 1, you can use Edit pull down menu and copy with base point.
When prompted for base point type 0,0
When prompted select objects, select the good data with 2 left mouse clicks, followed by enter key.
Now type E for erase command
When prompted for select objects type "All" and push enter (Not the speech marks)
This will select all objects in the model space of your drawing.
Push enter again and both your "Good data" and "Bad data" will be erased.
Now bring your "Good data" back to it's original position.
Right mouse and use "Paste to original co-ordinates" or type 0,0 if prompted for insertion point. Edit pull down menu has the same option.
Your Zoom extents should now show you "Good data" expanded to fill your screen.