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lines types, dimension styles etc.


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In the last two days I have done 42 detail drawings for a customer of mine. The company I work as a lisp routine/program to bring line types and dimension styles into a new drawing. The program works pretty well. I don't know where they got it from. But the program was written for inches. The customer I have been working for the last few days wants all of his drawings in metric. I lost a few minutes in each drawing having to change the ltscale setting, and the dimension style properties in each drawing. How does everyone else start a new drawing and bring in the line types, dimension styles etc?

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with a template (.dwt)

 

get one drawing exactly how you want it, then save as a .dwt. Then when you start a new drawing, use this as the starting template. Use File->New instead of Qnew so you can browse to the newly created template.

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with a template (.dwt)

 

get one drawing exactly how you want it, then save as a .dwt. Then when you start a new drawing, use this as the starting template. Use File->New instead of Qnew so you can browse to the newly created template.

 

rickh is right on the mark, and it is dead simple, so get used to doing it. In that way all of the text and dimension styles, layers, linetypes, table styles, the drawing sheet and just about anything else that you can think of (and are represented) in your drawing are saved into your new .DWT (template).

 

Just be sure to give it a name that you will remember, use the dropdown file type menu when you do your SAVEAS, and select file type autoCAD Drawing Template (*.DWT)

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In the last two days I have done 42 detail drawings for a customer of mine. The company I work as a lisp routine/program to bring line types and dimension styles into a new drawing. The program works pretty well. I don't know where they got it from. But the program was written for inches. The customer I have been working for the last few days wants all of his drawings in metric. I lost a few minutes in each drawing having to change the ltscale setting, and the dimension style properties in each drawing. How does everyone else start a new drawing and bring in the line types, dimension styles etc?

 

If it will be a metric drawing, be sure to start with a metric template!

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I have a related question. I always dimension in paper space. I use solview/soldraw to create my orthographic views. There scale is always 1:1. Then I scale up/down my title blocks to fit, after they are inserted as a block. My question is, how do you handle the overall scale of the dimensions? I use multiple dimension styles for fractional, two place, and three place dimensions. Would I still have to go into the dimension styles and change the overall dimension scale?

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I place all dimensions in my paper space layouts and it only requires the use of one dimension style. One. It seems you are creating extra work for yourself. Work smarter...not harder.

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Mark you have been helpful. I work in the tooling industry. The company I work for uses different dimension styles if a dimension is a two place decimal or three place decimal. Holes are called out as a fractional, unless a tolerance is needed. I do all my detailing in paper space. I could put more than one dimension style into a template drawing to handle the different dimension styles. When I do a drawing I create my solview/soldraw views. Insert my title block, and then scale it up depending on the size of the part to be detailed. For example I had to scale up my title by four. Then would I still have to go into my different dimension styles, go to the fit tab and change the overall scale to four? So when the drawing is printed for build you can still see the dimension arrows and be able to read the text easily.

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My single dimension style is based in real world units. Text is either .0938 or .125 in height. Arrowheads are .125 in length. Offsets for extension lines and such are .09375.

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No I do not. My title block and border are already part of my template. I have five layout tabs corresponding to the five sizes (actually four sizes and two orientations) of paper we use: 24x36, 18x24, 11x17, 8.5x11 (landscape) and 8.5x11 (portrait).

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Mark I really hate to keep bugging you. I have been working with autocad for the last seven years, and I feel I am asking some really noobie questions. I get how to use templates for starting a new drawing. When I design a tool I model up my assembly and then wblock out my individual details. What would be the best way to add my several layers and dimension style into the drawing I just wblocked? Or for instance I purge a drawing and I need to add back in my layer etc? I have only worked for one company. I would like to know how some other companies handle these issues.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Where to dimension/label is an ongoing discussion in my office and has been for as long as I can remember. Once you've created the various dimstyles you need, is there any extra work involved with keeping everything in model space or the original xref?

My hesitation to dimensioning in paper space has always been the time involved if you need to shift a viewport or edit the scale (which I bet annotative dimensions/text covers but that's a topic for another day).

Is this the case? Are my fears completely unfounded?

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I do all my dimensioning and text in my paper space layout and can't say that I have encountered any extra work.

 

One plus to doing it this way is I never have to deal with 1) scalelists and scalelist bloat, 2) I don't have to also worry about all the system variables associated with annotative scaling in general and 3) I only use about three different text heights max.

 

I think you should try both methods and decide for yourself which works best for your particular situation.

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I thought with 2011 or 2012 Autocad automatically detected unused scale lists and prompted you to purge/delete....? We created a lisp routine to deleted unused ones back on 2008 prior to Autocad cleaning up their own mess so it hasn't been an issue for some time.

I'm a proponent of model space, but the guy with the big red pen in our office (who hasn't used the computer to draft in 5+ years) wants it to remain as is.

Not the end of the world, I was just looking for that magic bullet for my argument.

Much appreciated.

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Since I do not use annotative scaling on a regular basis I cannot answer your question re: auto-purging of scalelists. I'd have to do some research. There are plenty of forum members who do use annotative scaling so perhaps one of them can enlighten us both.

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I have a related question. I always dimension in paper space. I use solview/soldraw to create my orthographic views. There scale is always 1:1. Then I scale up/down my title blocks to fit, after they are inserted as a block. My question is, how do you handle the overall scale of the dimensions? I use multiple dimension styles for fractional, two place, and three place dimensions. Would I still have to go into the dimension styles and change the overall dimension scale?

 

You should keep your title block the same size, don't use the SCALE command to change them.

Then change the viewport scale for your soldraw viewports so they fit in the title block. The objects for the various views will still be 1:1 in MS. Then you apply the dimensions, no scaling in the dim styles. I have quite a few different dim styles for various tolerances, number of decimal places, etc, but they are all set with out a dimscale factor.

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I spent some time last night looking at my issue. The lisp program I mentioned in my first post uses a few text files for bring in all the line types and dimension styles. I created a couple of new text files uses one of our existing files. I works pretty well other then it does not bring in the metric scale line types regardless if I use the acad or acadiso templates to start the drawing. I wonder if I could post a file here if someone (who is smarter then I am) would like to take a look at it.

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