Download OS MasterMap® in CAD format
First, we need to check the units we’re working with. Go to AutoCAD on the top left corner of the screen and click on ‘settings’. Then click on units and guides and make sure you’re working with millimetres like we have here. Click ok. Then we have to check that the map is to scale. We can do that by measuring our bar like so. You need to type in ‘distance in the command section, click ‘Enter’ and then make sure that the measurement on the scale bar is accurate. Here we have 10000 which looks accurate. 10000 is 10 m in millimeters.
The next step is to put our map onto a paper which we need to create. We click on this plus sign here and create a new layout. We can rename it if we wish by double clicking like so. I’ve choose to rename it ‘location plan’. We right click and choose ‘page setup’. From here we select DWG to PDF and then we check the page size. We want to work on an A4 paper size. The next thing and most important that we want to do is to choose the scale. So we go to ‘scale and we want to represent 1 mm as 1250 units so we type it in. We click ok and the map has been setup to the correct scale.
/cad-plansTo drop our map in we type in ‘vports’ in the command section, click ok and then place the map like so on the paper. So at paper space you can now change the extents of how that map would sit on the page, whereas if you click within that you're back in the model space where it acts as it did previously at this model tab here. And this allows us to zoom and pan as you see. By double clicking on the grey we then revert back to the paper space.
So the next step is to put in a scale bar. We repeat that process again by clicking viewports. We would then draw a box as so and as you see it dropped back in another map. By clicking in that we can then again change that scale which we're going to want at 1 to 1 to be the same as above and then we will just pan that to show the information we want to show which in this case is a scale bar. For planning applications, we usually need to add a red outline on the property we are applying to do the changes for. To do that you just need to click on this polyline tool and then go to the right on ‘properties’ and choose the colour. In this case we choose red, we change the line weight because I want it to be a bit thicker than it is and outline our property. The final step is to export it so you go up to the top where you have export and you can then choose to export that as a PDF where it will give you a dialog to save that where you wish. Or you can print it, plot it but it will take you through your plot settings in order to print that map out.
And that’s how you can create a location plan in AutoCAD.