Back in 1993 the company I worked for invested in their first workstations with AutoCAD R12 installed, this was MSDOS based as opposed to Windows. The company designed ground support test equipment for aircraft and was keen to explore all the advantages that CAD had to offer.
We still kept a couple of drawing boards as our existing drawings were on film and it was still far quicker to amend them the old fashion way then to re-draw them on CAD.
Our first plotter was an A0 pen plotter which was fascinating to watch although somewhat annoying if the pen ran out before the plot had finished. We used our existing film borders for the plotter and just filled in the title blocks by hand which seems a tad peculiar now, although back then many companies had their own quirky little practices when it came to CAD.
After a few years AutoCAD was upgraded to R13 and the plotter was upgraded to a HP Inkjet printer. The new Inkjet printer required an A1 spool of paper to be fed in. This meant we required some new CAD templates for our borders. A task which I was given.
Up until this point we had solely used model space in AutoCAD but after a chat with our CAD supplier it became apparent that templates created in paper space were the way to go. I clicked on the paper space icon and took the first tentative steps into the unknown.
The first task was to find out the maximum print area which would determine the very outside of our border. I based the new border designs on our existing ones but added a few more revision rows as we never seemed to have enough.
I created attributes for all the borders so it was quick and easy to fill in the various title blocks and I also decided to make the company address and logo XRef files. This meant the drawing border would automatically load in the updated version if either changed.
Once the border was drawn up I created some standard layers, back in those days we didn’t have many. From memory I believe they were: outline, hidden, hatch, dimensions and centerlines. It was also important to make sure the dimensions were set so they would be scaled relative to paper space which can be done under dimension settings and by clicking ‘annotative’ under the ‘fit’ tab. By doing this we maintained a standard with all drawings e.g. dimension text will always be 3.5mm high no matter what the paper size. The final part of the template was adding a viewport which displays the view of model space.
Once all the templates were stored in the correct directory we could open AutoCAD and simply pick the required template size to open, you then filled in all the attributes for the border and simply clicked the model space icon to start drawing in the viewport. It’s important to remember that all border sizes are printed off at 1:1 scale in paper space.
The model space in the view port was only ever scaled differently. As an example if I wanted the drawing in model space to be printed off at 1:5 I would simply type “Z” (zoom) then hit the Enter key, then “1/5XP” and the Enter key again, in the command bar, whilst in model space. This would scale the drawing at 1:5 when printed out.
It made a lot of sense to me to get some conformity to all the drawings no matter who drew them. I found over the years that if you just use model space and bring in a border to scale then you often got quite random size dimensions. Also when drawings are printed using just model space the borders used to come out different sizes.
Apart from getting some conformity to the drawings, paper space also has other benefits over model space. You can create multiple layouts showing portions of the drawing in different scales and you can turn on/off layers in different view ports. Another big time saving benefit is the ability to do large batch plots with ease. This is something that was a proper pain with just model space.
There are still some companies that prefer to use just model space and that isn’t wrong so to speak. It all comes down to personal preference but fast forward to now and I still use paper space and model space combined. It can take a little getting used to but most users soon realise it’s actually an easier way to work and the drawings look far more consistent and professional, so it’s a big thumbs up for paper space.
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