Drawing to scale

Drawing to scale

In traditional, manual drafting, you usually determine the scale of the drawing before you even start to draw, because you are working with a sheet of paper of a fixed size. You may have to reduce or enlarge the entity you are drawing to fit within the confines of the paper.

When you create a drawing in progeCAD, you draw everything full-size. You determine the type of units in which your drawing is measured. If you are drawing a building, 1 drawing unit might equal 1 inch. If you are drawing a map, 1 drawing unit might equal 1 mile. Your drawing environment and the CAD drawing file itself are not limited to the size of a particular sheet of paper.

As you draw, you can use commands such as Pan and Zoom to work on different portions of the drawing and to magnify the display of the drawing to view small details. These commands have no effect on the actual size of the entities in your drawing; they affect only the way the drawing is displayed on your screen. Only when you print or plot your drawing do you need to set the scale so that the printed drawing fits within a specific paper size.