WorldCAD Access

Newish eBook: Ralph Grabowski's Command Reference for AutoCAD 2013

  This book was formerly known as The Illustrated AutoCAD Quick Reference 2013 and Beyond, a paper book printed by Cengage Delmar publishing company. They had added the "and Beyond," because to save money they wanted me to update the book every third year, instead of every year.

The publishing company decided last month, however, to shut down its CAD book division entirely as book sales plummeted due to the abundance of free YouTube instructional videos, they tell me. I received from them the copyright on the books I wrote for them for the past 22 years. 

I'm calling this ebook the "Rough eBook Edition," because I essentially output the 1,106 pages to a PDF file, added a new cover, created a new title, and fixed the errors that were in the original print edition.

Ralph Grabowski's Command Reference for AutoCAD 2013, Rough eBook Edition offers you

• All commands in alphabetical order, all their options, and all the ways to invoke the commands 
• Every dialog box illustrated
• One thousand tips 
• Commands and system variables not documented by Autodesk 
• History of commands discontinued by Autodesk 
• System variable reference
• Quick references of shortcut keystrokes, buttons, cursor icons, and other user interface elements (see figure below)

Now, being 1,106 pages the ebook weighs in at a hefty 17MB, and so I will be sending you a download link through Dropbox.

Pricing and Ordering

Cengage Delmar charged $60 for the print book; I'm pricing the ebook edition at $29.95. You can order this PDF ebook through Paypal or by mailing a cheque.

To order through PayPal, please follow these steps:

1. Go to the ebook's Web page at www.upfrontezine.com/cr13
2. Click the PayPal button, and then following the instructions.

Should you prefer to pay by cheque (in US$, Euros, British Pounds, or CDN$), then please mail it to the my address:

Command Reference for AutoCAD 2013
34486 Donlyn Avenue
Abbotsford BC
V2S 4W7 Canada

Thank you!

Ralph Grabowski, author

 

PS: This is what two of the quick reference pages look like:

www.upfrontezine.com/ebooks

 

What's Inside? AutoCAD 2014

 

Here's what's inside 2014 

 

The cover image shows AutoCAD 2014 running on a Windows 8 touchscreen computer.

Autodesk last week announced and/or shipped its "2014" branded line of software. Unfortunately for us, they chose to emphasize during their official launch Webinar 'happy' (no kidding!) rather than new: "buy our suites, use our cloud."

To combat the reduction of new news, I've produced my annual guide to what's new in the newest release of AutoCAD. What's Inside? AutoCAD 2014 is 80 pages of new and changed commands and system variables, undocumented stuff, strong opinions and step-by-step tutorials.

This is a tradition now in its tenth year. Order your copy for $8 from www.upfrontezine.com/wia14 

Trio of BricsCAD V13 books -- now available!

 

Learn, Customize,   Compare

 

Ever since the release of V13 of BricsCAD late last year, I've been busy updating my trio of ebooks for the new version. As of yesterday, all three are available...

Learn from Book #1: Inside BricsCAD V13 teaches 2D drafting and 3D modeling with BricsCAD V13 (248 pages; $20)

Customize with Book #2: Customize BricsCAD V13 coaches on customizing and programming BricsCAD V13 (432 pages; $40)

Compare with Book #3: BricsCAD V13 for AutoCAD Users discovers how BricsCAD is similar to and different from AutoCAD (236 page; free!)

Learn from Inside BricsCAD V13

 

Here is more info at the books' Web pages, which handle all editions of the ebooks from BricsCAD V8 through V13. The Web pages provide links to purchasing this collection of ebooks through PayPal.

• 
  Inside BricsCAD at www.upfrontezine.com/lb8 

• 
  Customize BricsCAD at www.upfrontezine.com/cb8

• 
  BricsCAD for AutoCAD Users at www.bricsys.com/en_US/download/bcad/doc/BricsCADV13ForAutoCADusers-en_US.pdf (free download)

Customize with Customizing BricsCAD V13

 

There is are bonuses to becoming a customer: (a) be the first to learn about new ebooks and (2) get 30% off future purchases.

 

Compare with BricsCAD V13 for AutoCAD Users

 

 To view all of our ebooks, visit www.upfrontezine.com/ebooks

David Stein's new book: "Why Your Next IT Project Will Fail"

David Stein sent me a preview copy of his new book, Why Your Next IT Project Will Fail (and what you can do to avoid it).  Because it is a mere 41 pages, I read through the whole thing this morning.

He writes from experience, and so his pages are filled with practical advice, such as

If you automate a broken process, you end up with an automated broken process.

Indeed, I shuddered when I read many of his example situations, for they reminded me of the old days when I worked with co-workers in a company for someone else. For me, change could never happen fast enough at that consulting engineering firm and that magazine publishing company.

(Imagine, if you will, a boss who in 1984 resisted my attempts to introduce my own desktop PC to our department, because "guys don't type," he said.)

Mr Stein writes about the problems created by Magic Bullet Theories, Rice Bowl Fortresses, and Bong-Loaded Business Cases. (Caution: sometimes the language is salty.) Of the solutions he provides to each the many problems that plague interpersonal interactions, I was glad to see him present this one: when all other attempted solutions fail, leave! (I did, and it worked out great.)

Here's an example of one of his lists of warning signs; this list has to do with vendors becoming too friendly with office staff:

1. Employees frequently wearing vendor-branded apparel, and ball caps, to work.

2 .Vendors who are on unusually personal terms with key employees (knows each other’s wife and kids’ names, maybe even the names of their pets, etc.).

3. Vendors taking employees out for frequent lunches, dinners, drinks, vacations, brothels. [Brothels were offered by contractors to some of the engineering staff of the city of Montreal, Canada.]

4. Employees seem resistant to considering alternative products.

5. Employees rushing to implement trial versions of a particular vendor’s products into production, without following some procedure for evaluating products objectively.

Reminds me of the pretty saleswoman General Electric sent to my cubicle every couple of months, to remind me of the benefits of specifying their line of traffic signal controllers.

So, if you are feeling frustrated by what's happening in your department, then you may want to read this ebook, which is available from here: http://www.amazon.com/Your-Next-Project-avoid-ebook/dp/B00AS2I8AO. The $5 will be worth it.

 

 

 

 

New eBook from upFront.eZine Publishing: "Tailoring CUI for AutoCAD 2013"

 

Tailoring CUI for AutoCAD 2013 has been updated, and is now available for purchase. I'll be frank with you in saying that Autodesk did not make many changes to the CUI interface, but any changes that did occur are completely documented by this 200-page ebook. The ebook's Web page is at www.upfrontezine.com/cui13. 

To get this PDF ebook for $30.00 through Paypal, please follow these steps:

1. Log into www.paypal.com
2. Click Send Money
3. Enter the following information:

To: grabowski@telus.net
Amount: $30.00
Purchase: Goods

4. Click Continue.

If you prefer to mail a cheque or money order, then please use the following address:

Tailoring CUI for AutoCAD 2013
34486 Donlyn Avenue
Abbotsford, BC
V2S 4W7 Canada

Table of Contents

1. Working with CUI
2. Workspaces
3. Toolbars and Quick Access Toolbar
4. Ribbon part i: Tabs
5. Ribbon part ii: Panels
6. Ribbon part iii: Contextual Tabs
7. Menu Bar
8. Quick Properties
9. Rollover Tooltips
10. Shortcut Menus
11. Keyboard Shortcuts and Temporary Override Keys
12. Double Click Actions
13. Mouse Buttons
14. LISP Files
15. Legacy Section

 

'Bricscad V12 for AutoCAD Users' now in Japanese

One of the ebooks I write for Bricsys gets translated into other languages, and now Bricscad V12 for AutoCAD Users can be read in Japanese.
The Web site is here, with the direct download link here: http://www.bricsys.com/ja_JP/download/bcad/doc/BricscadV12ForAutoCADusers-ja_JP.pdf . The ebook is in PDF format, and is free.

 

Some of my ebooks now on Kindle

Thanks to the work done by Fair Trade Digital Exchange (a new distributor of my line of ebooks on CAD), you can now get AutoCAD ebooks as Kindle editions. The first two are:

• Tailoring AutoCAD 2012: Expert Tips, Tweaks and Modifications at www.amazon.com/dp/B007IX0KTI

• What's New Inside AutoCAD 2012at www.amazon.com/dp/B007IYKH2C  

Expect more titles in the coming months!

In addition, Fair Trade Digital Exchange is making a number of my ebooks available in other ebook formats, such as ePub and Mobi. When you purchase an ebook, you receive it in a ZIP file that holds all formats: EPUB (for most ebook readers), MOBI (for Kindle), and PDF.

More info at www.ftdxbooksonline.com.

(My ebooks in good ol' PDF format continue to be available from my eBooks.onLine portal at www.upfrontezine.com/ebooks)

I've joined new ebook publisher Fair Trade Digital Exchange as an author

I've been pumping out ebooks (a) ever since 2003 and (b) ever since I got tired of paper-based book publishers paying tiny royalties for my hard work. As you probably know, my line of ebooks is (a) massive and (b) available in PDF format, only.

I tried outputting them in other ebook formats, like ePub, but found (a) these formats require too much tweaking (hence the beauty of WYSIWYG PDF!) and (b) I just didn't have the time.

So I was pretty interested when I read about a new publishing company that was (a) dedicated to the ebook market and (b) dedicated to authors: Fair Trade Digital Exchange. Co-founder and former book agent Claudette Moore and I spent the last several months figuring out (a) how to meld our operations, in which I keep writing and distributing my ebooks in PDF, but (b) they get to reformat the books in all other ebook formats, and then distribute them through their own site, as well as other portals.

More recently, I've been working with co-founder and technical guy  Chris Williams on the tricky problem of making nice looking ePub documents from heavily formatted InDesign files. The ePub format is kind of like HTML, and so works best with books like novels, where all it consists of are chapter headings and plain text. ePub is a dog for technical books, which have figures, sidebars, and specially formatted text, like for programming code and command input.

So anyhow, long story short, today my name went up on the roster of authors with FairTradeDX.

The first ebook of mine being offered, What's Inside? AutoCAD 2012, is slightly dated, but Mr Williams thought it was the most heavily formatted, and so would make a good test case. In the weeks and months to come, more of my titles will become available. (Once conversion templates are perfected, the ePub translation happens faster.)

FairTradeDX sells its line of ebooks as a package. When you pay $9.95, you get the What's Inside title in a single ZIP file that contains all three formats:

• ePub for most ebook readers and software
• Mobi for Amazon ebook readers
• PDF for all other cases

fairtradedx.com

 

 

Writing dual-OS ebooks: some tips

With an increasing number of CAD packages now being released on more than one operating system, I find myself writing multi-OS ebooks. Usually, there are not sufficient people using Linux and OS X versions of CAD packages that are dominant in the Windows world, like AutoCAD and Bricscad for me to write ebooks specific to each operating system.

My solution is to write one ebook, and then point out differences when they occur in the the different OSes. For instance, writing about customizing AutoCAD, I put OS X-specific material in gray text; when it's a larger topic, I'll give the OS X part its own text box.

This is no problem for software from CAD vendors that chose to maintain a common look'n feel among their different OS versions, such as Bricscad and Graebert. For someone like Autodesk who took the opposite route (make the CAD software look like the OS in which it is running), I publish screen grabs of UI elements, such as dialog boxes, from both Windows and OS X, and place them side by side -- with a caption pointing out the differences.

I use InDesign as my desktop publishing software, and I have legit versions for both OS X and Windows. I find OS X clunky, however, and so I write my ebooks on my triple-monitor Windows workstation whenever I can.

This leads to the problem of how to get screen grabs (and sometimes text) from the Mac mini computer to my Acer desktop computer. The ideal situation is to simply save the PNG files over the network, but I find OS X isn't reliable in wanting to make the connection. For a while I sent the files to myself by Gmail, out of frustration.

A better solution than Gmail is to use DropBox: save the PNGs to the Dropbox folder on the Mac, and then a short time later they appear in my PC's Dropbox folder. (I would be using SugarSync, but on the Mac it keeps telling me something is wrong and I need to reboot the Mac. Solution: use DropBox instead.)

This issue of transferring files is less of a problem with Linux, which connects to networked PCs more easily than Macs or even Windows. Also of note: the screen grab software that comes native with Linux is better than that written by Apple or Microsoft.

Updated for V12: Customizing Bricscad ebook

This is the only book on the planet that tells you how to customize Bricscad. Customizing Bricscad V12 is the 7th edition, and offers you the following newness:

• New chapter on Fields
• New chapter on customizing mouse buttons
• Updated text and figures for V12
• Now 426 pages long

Covers both Linux and Windows versions of V12. Price is $40 and can be purchased by cheque or PayPal through the ebook's Web page:

www.upfrontezine.com/cb8