Working with underlays

- Occasionally, we need to copy or trace information … that we cannot get in CAD form. … This might be topography maps, component panel layouts, … or even old, hand drafted plans. … Fortunately AutoCAD for Mac allows us to insert … a number of file types as underlays, … both for tracing and other purposes. … To start we'll go to the Insert menu … and then choose the file type … that we want to underlay, in this case, PDF. … PDFs can be inserted by clicking here … and then locating our file and clicking open. … Like external references, we can specify … the attachment path, insertion point, rotation and scale. … If you have a PDF with multiple pages, … they'll be displayed here. … I'll click attach, then place and scale my PDF. … Once the file is inserted we have a few options … which we can find by selecting the PDF itself … and then following along in the underlay visor. … From here we can change the scale, change the fade, … which is great for tracing, show or hide the PDF, … or clip the PDF to only show part of the file. …