in an earlier section we discussed how AutoCAD uses a Cartesian coordinate system sometimes we need to create nodes at specific coordinates not a line at an arc or circle these are known as points and there is a command that you can use that will help you draw a point its size doesn’t matter because a point by definition has no size it’s only a marker or a node for a specific set of coordinates a good example of using points would be that of a surveyor locating the corners of a piece of property the nice thing about points is that you can define their display size and you can snap to them so if somebody gives you a list of points you can put them in your drawing and draw lines sort of like playing connect the dots so let’s draw some points the command is point
or just po4 point
you can also find it in the draw panel of the Home tab in the ribbon you can draw points or multiple points so once the command is started you can enter in the coordinates if you know what they are or you can just pick on your screen you
just press the scape
you can see these are tiny dots and they may be difficult for you to see even but there are some settings that you can use you can also select them if you use the erase command you can select the objects and press Enter
let’s put a point in at a specific coordinate
start the point command then let’s zoom down here a little bit so type in the number five the tab key and the five so this will put us at coordinate five comma five right here
points are also three dimensional but not an autocad LT just like every object in autocad if you leave the third coordinate off it will be drawn at an elevation of zero so you can now just start by drawing some points randomly on the screen and they look a lot like dots right now then if not that’s okay we’ll get into that so let’s add some more let’s put one at 6 comma 10
it went up here
randomly pick some
escape now start the polyline command and type in n OD for your oh snap which will be a node point and click on one of the dots
doing that and just connect your dots together
what you’re doing now is just plotting out these points and then connecting them by drawing them together with a polyline
and you can make various shapes etc now your points are still there it didn’t go away they’re just hard to see right now if you want to change the appearance of your points you can you have to use some different system variables one of them is called PD mode
by default it’s
20 and this changes the appearance the other one is called PD sighs and that’s for changing the size so if we set in one
and we zoom in it’s still hard to see if it pd sighs
set to zero that’s part of your problem if we set it to one refresh our screen it’s still not working the way we want that’s because these settings are very hard to use so let’s go to something else called dd p type
press enter now we have something we can use this is a nice little visual style or you can pick what your point looks like this is a dot this is nothing this is a plus an X etc and now you can pick the size when you’re done you click OK and there you go points you can use so if we type in the DDP type again we can change the point size right here another a bit smaller you might have to do a region re a regional to visualize it
there’s another setting here set size and absolute units that will set the size of it and lock it in so we have it at point five units so no matter how far we zoom in or out or what scale the drawing is at it will be point five units in size sometimes though you will use a viewport and you’ll have a different scale for your drawing in so your point five may be too small so sometimes you may need to be set to the relative to screen size now that will keep it at point five units but relative to the size of your screen it’s a percentage and not a unit size so let me show you if I click OK they reduce in size there at half of a percent of my screen size so if my screen here is one hundred percent it’s taking half of one of those percent’s now if i zoom in it looks like they’re bigger but when i refresh my screen again they’re smaller so they stay the same size regardless of where I’m at let’s pick a different percentage one that’s easier to see let’s go kind of big you go ten percent so now you see how big they are if i zoom in
relative to the screen
now that’s very handy when you have a lot of points over a big area and you’re changing the scale of your view but sometimes you do want to lock them into one size it’s all going to depend on what you’re trying to do with your drawing
now keep in mind that all of these settings for your points will be reflected throughout your file you can’t have some points that look like an X some points that look like a box etc you can’t have some points that are you know ten units and others that are five it just doesn’t work that way it’s unfortunate but it is a limitation however typically you’re only going to want to see the points in one way anyway hopefully but they are limited that way there’s a lot you can do with them and they’re easily imported and exported with CSV files and a spreadsheet type files and surveyors use them a lot so there are a lot of different things you can do with them and they give you information that’s not lines or arcs
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