

Use a grid, and find or create a symbol library you like. IEC standards are also 11x17 (or A3 which is close), and most electronic schematic software works on a 0.1" grid (2.54mm - same as IEC which works on a 2.5mm grid) Most of the Auto industry has switched to Eplan, which is nice (but waaaay too expensive to be taken seriously) and at least has a good symbol library and fairly legible design standards (ie, 11x17 symbols as opposed to D size).

You can completely re-do the symbol library and autocad electrical can be a very powerful tool, but it takes a lot of time to get to that point. That said, it is the standard and you do see many companies use it (not the auto industry anymore, ironically enough). Because Autocad is based in the auto industry, there are some pretty dumb and archaic standards built into autocad electrical - like "D" sized sheets and symbol libraries that, when printed on 11x17 or 8.5x11, are nearly illegible IMO. On the subject of a 'good' symbol library, Autocad Electrical does not have one IMO.

There are other autocad clones such as Bricscad (which offers a perpetual license and lisp, plugins, etc that autocad LT does not) or ZWcad. Now you'll be asked to select a menu file, we're using schematic drawings, not panel drawings so we select Schematic there and it brings up the DAT file, the default DAT file, now we're using NFPA standards as well so you can see that that's the NFPA menu.DAT file I'll click on OK, also I've done that, the Icon Menu Wizard comes up and it looks remarkably like the icon menu that you used to insert symbols into your schematic drawings.DWG is definitely the standard - so whatever you look for should be able to export to DWG.īasic autocad is fine if you have a good symbol library and can keep good documentation of the components you use.

So we'll keep the control.dwg file open, go to the Schematic tab on the ribbon and you want to go to the other Tools panel here and select Icon Menu Wizard. What we're going to look at now is customizing the Icon Menu to add our custom symbols to it so they can be used over and over again. We're staying in our control.dwg file in our Project 004, and what you can see there that I've done is zoom extense, there's our custom symbol that we brought in the previous video.
