An often overlooked feature when working in Autocad 2D is the setting up of Drawing Limits. Doing so will ensure that your navigation of a drawing is effortless – we show you how in our Autocad 2D training courses.
Setting the Drawing Limits of a drawing is just about the first thing we should do before we start any drawing. In AutoCAD 2D we always draw within the program’s Model Space, and we draw to real scale (ie.1:1). Then when the drawing is complete and we’ve added dimensions and text, we are ready to print. At this point we go into our paper Layouts (accessed via the bottom of the interface) and create one or more Viewport windows.This is the point where we would scale the drawing, for example 1:50 or 1:100. A list of scale settings can be found by clicking in the Viewport window and clicking on the pop-up list button on the bottom right of the Task bar. Viewport windows are like cut-out portals into your drawing’s Model Space, so that whatever we have created in the Model space will be visible in the paper layout.
To return to the Drawing Limits:  the best way to think of your drawing space is as a massive sheet of paper that you draw your building elevation (or site plan or machine part) onto. Note that these Drawing limits only really only affects your capacity to zoom and pan and generally navigate around the drawing. If you’re finding trouble zooming or panning, this would indicate that the Drawing limits are actually too small for the object and you simply need to increase them.These Limits will therefore vary according to the size of the drawn object. For example a machine part may only need limits of 1000mm wide, whereas a building will need limits 10m wide, and a site plan may need 150m wide. So it varies accordingly.
To set our Drawing Limits we simply type LIM into the Command Line or the Dynamic Input field at the cursor. Make sure you press Enter to accept 0,0 as the default lower-left corner. This is also known as the World Origin Point. And you could accept 420,297 as the Default upper-right corner, which represents a standard A3 paper size, which is fine for a smaller object like a machine part. But for a 10m wide house you would need a drawing space about 30m wide to include two side elevations. In such a case your limits would therefore be 0,0 for the Lower left corner and 30000, 20000 for the Upper right corner. In this manner it’s easy to guess the size of the required Drawing Limits and possibly adjust them later if necessary.
The alternative method is to multiply the paper sheet size (eg. A2 = 594 x 420) by the Scale Factor (eg.50), which would equal Drawing Limits of 0,0 and Upper-right 29700,21000. Lastly type Z > A (for Zoom > All) to show the whole drawing space. If nothing is yet drawn, there will be nothing as yet to see. But addressing the issue of Drawing limits early on will certainly help when you begin to draw your objects.
More information on all features of the program can be found at the AutoDesk website. And see many examples of our clients’ work on our Facebook page.
Other related Autocad 2d Blog Posts:

• Autocad 2d basics
• Autocad 2d introduction
• Autocad 2d drawing
• Autocad 2d workspace
• Autocad 2d isometric