Scaling

Hello all,

I'm working on a drawing of a jobsite. The jobsite has multiple buildings surrounded by water wells. Each well has a unique ID, ie MW-7. In model space everything is drawn at a 1:1 scale. The jobsite is quite large, and in layout view my scale is set to 1"=100'. Everything looks visually pleasing, text size, block sizes (symbol for the well location, etc.). However, I need to create a new layout that zooms into a particular portion of the site. I need my scale to be roughly 1"=50'.

My question is this: How can I set my drawing so that when I zoom into the area of interest, the block symbols and the well IDs stay the same size and don't crowd up the entire page? Otherwise my well IDs are huge! I think it might have something to do with annotative scaling, but I can't get it to work properly. This drawing is being done in AutoCAD 2012

Thanks in advance!

Was annotative scaling used initially for text and dimensions?

If I follow,

what you need to do is Lock your paperspace viewport.

Create a second viewport with the desired scale for the Detail view and lock that as well.

Create layers for the text for each viewport.

You can control the layer visiblity in the viewports bylayer.

Annotative scaling wasn't used, but I can change that pretty quick I believe.

If you could change it pretty quickly would having both 1"=100" and 1'=50' scales assigned to your blocks and well IDs solve your problem? I'd test that independent of your original drawing before going any further.

Well, the catch is there are engineers that go into the drawing and want to zoom in and out to take dimensions. I guess what I'm looking for is the ability to zoom in and out in the viewport and make it so that the labels always appear to be the same paper size. Does that make sense?

You can add as many annotative scales as you desire, however simply zooming won't cause the blocks (or any other objects) to automatically resize, you'll have to change the scale via the scale list box for them to re-scale.

The thing to remember with annotative blocks is to draw them at the size you want them to print. If you want the well symbol to print at 1/4" on paper, then make the circle 1/4".