From the course: AutoCAD 2019 Essential Training

Locking viewports - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD 2019 Essential Training

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Locking viewports

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- [Instructor] We're starting another chapter now in our AutoCAD Essential Training Course. And we're going to be looking at working with layouts and the annotation in those layouts and in the viewports in those layouts as well. So we've got a new drawing for you. It's called Layouts.dwg. And you may recognize it from previous chapters in the course, it's the floor plan with the grids, the dimensions, the walls, the doors, the windows, etc. And what we're going to look at initially is locking viewports in a Layout tab to stop people changing the scale of the viewport by mistake, or perhaps altering the properties of the viewport by mistake, or perhaps deliberately. So what we're going to look at is how these viewports are created and how they're locked down. Now at the moment we're in the Model tab where everything is drawn full size, as per what we've covered previously in the course. In order to create a viewport we need to go into one of the Layout tabs. Now we're going to create a Layout tab for the left-hand staircase, which is staircase A. So that's this staircase over here on the left in the model space. So first thing we're going to do is rename Layout1 here. So we'll right click on it, and we'll rename it to STAIR A, like so and press enter. So now we know that that particular layout is going to show us staircase A. So if I click on that STAIR A layout now, you'll see that it just opens with a default sheet and a default viewport. Now what we need to do is make sure that our viewports are on a separate layer. So go to the Home tab on the ribbon, and into your Layer Properties, and just expand out the layer names like so. And if we scroll down we need to just make sure that we've got a viewports layer. So just roll down on the wheel, and you'll notice there's no viewports layer, by the look of things, in our drawing. So we'll just create a new layer, and we'll call it VIEWPORTS, and just press enter. I normally give it a blue color so that it stands out on a white background like so. So I'll give it the blue color like so. Now the other thing that you want to do in the Layer Properties Manager is make sure that your viewports don't plot. So see this little plotter icon here, just click on it, and you'll get a little no entry symbol. That basically means that it won't plot when you plot any of your AutoCAD drawings. Also make it the current drafting layer for the moment as well. So double click on the sheet of paper next to it. And then close the Layer Properties Manager. Now as with most Layout tabs in AutoCAD drawings, you do get a default viewport. It's here. So if I click on that right now, you can see that it's on layer 0. So let's just go to the layer dropdown and scroll all the way down to the bottom and put it on our viewports layer. So it's now on the appropriate layer. We're now just going to quickly resize the viewport a little bit. With it selected, just click on the grips, and we'll just take that up a little bit inside the printer limits there, take it across this way, like so. Now I'm going to double click inside the viewport to activate it. I'm going to zoom in on staircase A there. Like so. So let's get that roughly in the middle. And if you now have a look down here on the status bar, you can see that we have a scale of 0.015070, not a standard scale. Click on the arrow, and we'll set that to something like 1 to 20, and that's a little bit too big. So we need to bring that down a bit. Let's try, say, 1 to 30, and if we keep going, I think probably 1 to 50 will work in that case. There we go. And then just pan, don't zoom, otherwise you'll mess up the scale, like so. Double click outside the viewport to deactivate it, and we've now got a viewport set to a known scale. So what we want to do there is we want to lock that viewport to that scale. So just click on the edge of it with it deactivated, and you'll notice down here on the status bar there's a little padlock. Click on it. That means the viewport is now locked. Double click away from the viewport or hit escape to deselect. If it's activated double click away from it, hit escape to deselect. And now if I double click inside that viewport and activate it and try and zoom by rolling up and down on the wheel, can you see? It doesn't affect the scale of the viewport because it's locked. Double click away from the viewport to deactivate. You now have a locked viewport at a scale of 1 to 50 that you cannot change unless you select the viewport again and unlock it.

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