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1. Setting your Preferences

In HighDesign, preferences are organized in two groups: Application preferences, that apply to all documents, and Project Properties, that are specific to each document. To set your application preferences, choose the menu item HighDesign 2015 > Preferences. A tabbed window shows the available sections and options to customize HighDesign.

The General pane allows you to set the language, startup actions, the autosave timer and the number of undoable actions.

Workspace allows you to choose the global theme, Dark or Light, used in the main window and panels. Other options include "Play Sounds" that controls the playback of feedback sounds in the main window, and the visualization of help messages in the status bar. The second section includes the options for scrolling and zooming. Selection and editing options are available in the last section.

The Drawing pane shows options relative to the drawing mode, snap sensivity, visualization of pen weights and line end caps, and a special option for freehand lines smoothing.

In HighDesign Professional you find two more panes: Shortcuts controls the custom key shortcuts assigned to menu items and tool commands; Templates shows and organizes the built-in and custom templates.

2. Set up project properties

When you launch HighDesign, the default document is an empty sheet at a 1:10 drawing scale. To begin working on your project, you probably want to choose a different scale, set drawing units and colors. Choose Drawing > Sheet Scale to change the drawing scale of the current sheet.
Choose File > Project Properties to customize sheet format and units, grid, colors, and to enter the project metadata and copyright information.

The different panes let you set the sheet format and size, margins; linear units, available as metric, imperial and screen units, with precision levels for decimal or fractional rounding, and angular units; grid size and color; background and selection colors; copyright and metadata info associated with the project.

These settings are saved into the document, but are not automatically available in new documents and will have to be set again for each new document. HighDesign Professional provides Templates to instantly create documents with presets of project properties.

3. Organize layers, linetypes, hatches, and more.

Go to Organize > Drawing Manager... to open the Drawing Manager window, where you can organize and manage layers, linetypes, hatches and patterns, and colors.

By default, HighDesign loads some standard resources like common linetypes and simple hatches. To add more resources to the current project, use the appropriate pane of the Drawing Manager window.

Use the Layers pane to create, delete or reorder project layers. In HighDesign, you can create a new layer in several ways, including the menu bar, popup menus, the layers panel in the Sidebar, and the Layers pane in the Drawing Manager window.

To load more linetypes into the current project, or create and edit your own linetypes, use the Linetypes pane.

Use the Hatches pane to load, create and edit linear hatches and vector patterns.

The Colors pane lets you bind certain colors and pen weights, so that selecting a color automatically sets the corresponding pen.