Understanding the coordinate system
Understanding the coordinate system is essential to understanding the way AutoCAD works. In AutoCAD, you can assign length and angles, as well as coordinate values, to make drawings, but to do all this, knowledge of the coordinate system is essential.
Primarily, there are two types of coordinate systems that we will use to make geometries in AutoCAD: Cartesian and polar coordinates.
Cartesian coordinates
AutoCAD follows the Cartesian coordinate system, which is a graphical method of assigning coordinates to a point in space. The simple three-dimensional (3D) space has three coordinates, namely X, Y, and Z, which are mutually perpendicular to each other, as in the following diagram. The point of intersection of the three mutually perpendicular axes is the origin, which is represented as (0,0,0):
Figure 2.1: Mutually perpendicular coordinates
The position of any point in a 3D space can be specified using these three...
