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← Applied BIM, CAD & Digital Design Professional Program
Module 2 · CAD Drafting Standards

CAD Drafting Standards

AIA/NCS layer naming, line weights and linetypes, sheet setup with title blocks and scale, text and dimension standards, ANSI/ISO drafting conventions, and the CAD file organization and version-control discipline that keeps a drawing set consistent.

A layer name, a line weight, or a title block is not administrative detail — it is how a drawing communicates its own organization to every other person and every piece of software that touches it. This module works through the AIA/NCS layer naming structure, the color-dependent versus named plot style systems that control line weight, model space versus paper space sheet setup, and the text and dimension conventions that keep a hundred-sheet set legible at its actual plotted scale.

It also covers where ANSI Y14.5 GD&T and ISO 128 projection conventions diverge from AEC-specific NCS practice, and the file organization and version-control habits — naming conventions, xref discipline, revision tracking — that are the direct, manual-discipline ancestor of the BIM Common Data Environment covered later in this program.

Free related reading in this studio
→ Sheet Index Generator→ Concept Explainer: 2D CAD vs. BIM→ System Architecture

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