hello my name is Randy Dobson I'm an instructor here in the Houston Texas area and this video will be covering the line command for AutoCAD 2018 and the one thing when it comes to drawing a line is understanding what information you need normally you when you go from point to point that's defined but let's just say here I'm gonna start the line command it wants a starting point I'm gonna just select here and as you can see I've got my ortho one which if you haven't watched that video you need to watch it fourth though I'm gonna hit f8 and that frees it up but if ortho is on all I need to do together go straight up and down or left and right is just type in a distance let's just say ten and there I hit escape and I'm done I've drawn a line ten units long now unfortunately all our drawings our lines are not all straight so there is another option to use which is the the polar tracking which I've kind of got a little diagram here to show you how AutoCAD works I think I went over this in another video but just to refresh your memory that this is your zero line right here your x and y but going to the left is positive so if you say I drew a line let me get a line here I drew a line from here but then I wanted it to go at say 60 degrees you can see that I'm showing a 60 in my little polar tracking but that's not exact enough so what I'm going to do is I'm going to type in 5 and then the greater than symbol I'm sorry the less than symbol it is a symbol that shares with the comma you hit shift now as you notice it's looking for an angle and I'm gonna type in 60 so it's created a line and I'm done drawing so I hit escape just to kind of show you this is the sixty degrees now if I would have drawn this line and put in five and then the less than and negative 60 it would have came down this way that all your rotation and all your angles compositive go to the left just for another example let me draw a line and now if I wanted to go out over here that's gonna probably be in the the 135 range so I would type in 5 for my distance shift less than and then 135 and there we have it this is the dimension that it's drawn now the one thing to remember when you're drawing lines drawing circles is you cannot eyeball them okay I know I bring this up a few times but you may say okay I'm going to draw a line like this and then I'm gonna come back and start another line and I'm gonna draw it right there and then I'm going to start another line right there then I'm gonna start another line right there and there I've got my object well as you zoom in you will notice that oh actually I take that back I actually had my my Oh snaps on so it was actually snapping to the exact point that wasn't what I wanted to show let me let me start that over again if I go a line like this if I come over here to draw another line trying to get it to be exactly on that spot is very hard to do okay and as you notice I'm trying to get closer and closer to that end point and each time it looks like it's on it until I zoom in and again you may say well that's that's pretty darn close that's probably the thickness of a hair but again if it's holding back any kind of flammable material or toxic gases that little space could mean you know the difference also when you're dealing with parts that are being cut out they need to be exact so unless you're using a coordinate you're using a specific point or a radial then it's not being done correctly let me erase that so dealing with the coordinates there's another way of doing it so I'm going to do a line and it's asking me for a starting point and I'm just going to go from coordinate zero comma zero enter and there my line is started at zero zero and I could take it to say 20 comma 20 and there I've drawn a line again if you haven't watched a chord in a video you need to watch that but this is one of the ways to draw a line is also with the with the coordinates and if I list this line you'll see that the coordinates it starts at zero zero x and y and then goes x and y to 2020 that's what I set it at so remembering that when you draw a line if you wanted to go straight and you can select here you can come down here and type line you can type L is it's one of the hotkeys that'll start it for you several ways to start line but lion will continue until you hit escape or if I wanted to draw this this and this and then I want it to end it back here I can just go to close it closes it automatically for me to the exact point and it ends to command otherwise if I just want it to draw three lines and then stop I have to hit escape and that stops the line and that concludes my video on the line command thank you