Ok speed of drafting is usually important to drafters right?
Especially when you asked to pull and all nighter on something and wish rather
to go home at 7 or 8! So for all of you trying to improve your drafting here
are a few of my personal tips I've collected over the years from the best
drafters at different companies.
First and foremost, edit your pgp file and make command abbreviations, that you can remember and are comfortable with. Also try to use duplicate and triplicate letter abbreviations and keys that are close to each other for the command abbreviations.
Try learning the AutoCAD alt+ menu pulldown method for design commands and
stuff, it's pretty sick for civil and survey drafting and speeds things up
massively. Everything is reachable by a max of 4 or 5 keys pressed, most are 2
or 3.

If you want to be even faster switch your mouse to the left hand, so you can
numberpad and do commands with one hand, and not have to reach the right hand
all the way across the board and back and forth from the number pad.

This is going to sound real funny, get an old digitizer pad yeah one of them
things. set it up for all the commands that are a pain to get to that you use
all the time, as well as some of the more common zooms and osnaps (16 BUTTONS
UNLIKE THE 3 ON A MOUSE!) if you can get used to it, extreme speed....nuf said.
(Viewport lock and unlock work really well on it as well)

If you think there should be a quicker way to do something look on the internet
for free lisps.

This is the part that is the easiest, but least used by most drafters. Make
your own personal drawing templates, layer filters, dimstyles, blocks, and
anything else that can be automated. Take the time to set everything AutoCAD
can do for you up. It can be time consuming all in one chunk. So do it bit by
bit as you go.

Here are some things I do personally like this:
Setup a drawing template with all borders in it, create a toolpallette and add
a layout from template command that links to that drawing that way instead of
just bringing in a border I bring in the plot styles, viewport, standard
blocks, details, legend, scale etc whatever else I need with that templateIf you have express tools do the same thing with the
dimstyle importer, and with the layer manager so you can import all of your
template layers anytime at will.

If you run civil or ldd, take the time out to get to know
how symbol manager works. Set it up, and use it instead of a spare drawing or
toolpallette for blocks. toolpallette is great for stuff like standard details,
but lacks some of the better options like repeat insert and lisp commands pre or
post block insert. It can however be painful to setup.
Those are what I personally use to automate a companies drafting style for me,
and it works pretty well, most times after a drawing or 3 I get few markups. Also make sure to backup any and all modifications to cad you've done, and save yourself a floppy or cd as well. Put it in a safe spot at home, just in case of a random upgrade install, or crash at work, or God forbid an unlooked for change in job situation.










The last is advice that applies to every field of work. Don't draw knowing you
will have to fix something later, or change something later. Draw like it is
final design and you can't make any mistakes because you'll never see it again.
This out of everything else is the most important advice I could give to
anyone. The most productive drafters and designers, do the best design possible
from the very start. Never draw with the intent in mind of trying to sneak
something past the QC, or maybe it will slide at the county... You will just
have to fix it later if you do, costing far more in time and money to backtrack
than maybe having had to go the long way the first time.

Doing one of those in combo with a good lisp package can make a drafter really
stand out in a company.  If you can learn to do all of them, you'll be
well on your way to a better paycheck. After all that’s why we draft isn't it?I have on small parting piece of advice as well, this goes out to the managers and employers. Allow people to try to improve the way they draft.  Give your people flex on production speed improvements, you'll get a lot more out of them. Yes it can take an hour on the web to find that lisp routine thats perfect for what they need, or however long to set something up just right. However, you get a lot more work if they are spending time doing important calculations or design rather than a simple repetitive task that could be automated.iDraft2007-09-21 15:04:53