To zoom in and out, you can rotate the mouse wheel. Take your mouse pointer to the part of the drawing that you want to zoom in or out of and then rotate the wheel. Rotating it in one direction will zoom in and in the other direction will zoom out. The point where you place your cursor will become the center of zoom.
If your drawing is very large or very small and even off-screen, then simply zooming in or out may take time and a lot of zooming and panning will be required to fit the drawing to the visible space. To overcome this issue, you can use the zoom extents option, which fits all the objects in the drawing to the visible space. To use zoom extents, double-click the mouse wheel and everything in your drawing will fit into the available space.
The zoom tool does not affect the actual size of the drawing; it only affects the scale. A line of a 1 mm length will remain equal to 1 mm, no matter how big or small you make it using the zoom tool.
You can also use the navigation bar to use the zoom tools. To use the zoom tools from the navigation bar, click on the arrow underneath the zoom icon in the navigation bar and you will see a list of zoom options, as shown here:
Here is an explanation of some of the options available in the zoom menu:
- Zoom Extents: This option fits all the available objects in the visible drawing area. It can be used by double-clicking the scroll wheel.
- Zoom Window: This option lets you zoom a part of a drawing by making a window. To use this feature, click at a point in the drawing area then let go of your cursor. Then, click again at another point to complete the window. The drawing will be zoomed to fit the selected window.
- Zoom Previous: This option will take you to the previous zoomed state of your drawing. It's like an undo option for the zoom command.
- Zoom Realtime: This option lets you zoom your entire drawing by moving your cursor. When you select the option, your cursor will look like a magnifying glass. Now, click anywhere in the drawing area and hold your cursor, then move up to zoom in and move down to zoom out.
- Zoom All: This option fits the drawing as per the limits set in the drawing. We will discuss more about limits later in this book.
- Zoom Object: This option allows you to select the object(s) from the drawing and then only your selected object(s) is zoomed to fit the screen.
So, these are the zoom options available in AutoCAD. Although we have discussed lots of zoom tools here, you will primarily require the mouse wheel zoom in and out and the Zoom Extents tool, which is available by double-clicking the mouse wheel. Other zoom tools are not very frequently required but whenever you need them, you now know where to find them. In the next section, we will start learning about making selections using different selection sets available in AutoCAD.