Entities are the individual geometric items (lines, circles, etc.) from which you build your drawing. CC3 stores mathematical information about the entities you draw. For example, CC3 knows the position of a Line by where it starts and ends, its length, and its angle. You can choose from many types of entities available from the Draw buttons and Draw menu.
Drawing are divided into stacked sheets. The entities are placed on these sheets. Sheets are not a property of an entity, they are a way of organizing entities.
In addition to having geometric properties, each CC3 entity has drawing properties that help to organize or edit your drawing. Each entity individually maintains a record of these properties:
· Color
· Layer
· Line Width
· Pen Thickness
· Line Style
· Fill Style
All entities have these properties, although this may not be apparent from their appearance; for example,while text can have different line styles it will still appear the same.
Entnties created with drawing tools are simply entities with particular properties. A river could be a blue smooth path with a Solid line style on the WATER/RIVERS layer. These entities can be added using the map buttons.
Symbols are a special type of entity. They are used for map features such as trees, citites and mountains. Symbols consist of two parts:
· Definition, which is always hidden from view.You only need one definition of a particular symbol in a drawing.
Reference, which is what you see on the screen. Many references can point to the same definition, so you can have many tree symbol references in a drawing without taking up lots of memory.
Symbols can be found in symbol catalogs. You can access these using the layer buttons or catalog button.