Copyright: Copyright © 1995 Gamma Software


Contents
Drawing Area

When you first enter GammaCAD, you are placed in a new Untitled drawing.  The initial drawing is blank, this means it contains no drawing elements.  The drawing area is the area in which you can create drawing elements.  It is the rectangular area in the middle of the program window.  It is bounded by the command tool bar on top, the status area on the right side, the snaps tool bar on the left side, and the message or prompt area at the bottom.  The use of these sections will be described in more detail later.  The drawing area also contains two rectangles which represent the outer edge of the printer page and the printable area on that page.

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Drawing Area

The first 2 fields in the status area indicate the current xy position of the cursor within the drawing area.  The cursor can be moved using the mouse or the keyboard arrow keys.  Move the cursor around the drawing area and watch how the xy position in the status area changes.  This will give you a feel for the coordinate system.  As you move the cursor to the right, the x value in the status area increases.  As you move the cursor up, the y value increases.

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program window


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Drawing Area

This program uses a standard 2 dimensional xy coordinate system.  Positions are specified by giving their x and y value.  These positions are indicated by 2 values within parentheses.  For example, (10,20) indicates an x position of 10 and a y position of 20.

The origin of this coordinate system (0,0) is initially placed in the lower-left of the drawing area.  The x axis starts at the origin and increases to the right.  The y axis starts at the origin and increases upward.

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Drawing Area

These xy positions can be in any units (e.g. feet, inches, meters, etc.) and are referred to as drawing units in this program.  You decide what drawing units to use in your drawing.  There is no program command which sets the drawing units.  All you need to do is use the desired units when creating your drawing elements.  For example, if you want to use feet, simply enter the coordinates of the drawing elements you create in feet.

This ends this tutorial