To use or not to use Annotative Scaling

[bennyboy86]

Hey everyone in my office seems to be a nice little seperation of people using annotative scales and and not using annotative scales.

I am one who doesnt use them. I am also the Standards manager for the office so i am really looking for reason why i should use them as i find that in our work it is not worth the effort.

in our company we have our layout plans set to 1:100 with nothing else and we have seperate drawings for sections and details, etc set to correct scale as you all will know.

my argument for not using them is that annotative scaling only useful if using numerous viewports with different scales in a single drawing. which in our office is maybe 5% of the time.

need some honest opinions, i belive for us not needed, but would like to know other peoples opinion of that matter.

thanks everyone.

[CyberAngel]

If you only ever have one scale, there is no reason to use annotative scaling. None. Ever. It's a needless complication.

My 2 pence.

[ReMark]

We do not use annotative scaling although I have gone through three tutorials just to learn more about the feature. I cannot find a good reason to use it in our business (chemical manufacturing) but I could see where it would be very useful to those in the architectural and structural fields.

[bennyboy86]

good just what i wanted to hear, yeah it gets complicating to go into a drawing and you click to change a mleader and all the different scales of what you have shows up of that text and just annoys the s*#$ out me....... good no annotative in our office decission made once and for all!!

[ReMark]

With annotative scaling you have to keep an eye on your scalelist especially so when you start to use xrefs. Then there are a handful of system variables that you'll have to become familiar with. When we do a fabrication drawing and we're dimensioning our steel we have one dimension layer and we use use one dimension style. It doesn't get much easier than that.

[rkent]

It is not all that complicated, learn 5 or 6 sysvars and you are good to go. The thing I like about annotative text is setting the text height to the plotted size. Not that big of a deal when you only use one scale I suppose but with other scales it is easier for the user to type 0.10 for a text height instead of the height times the scale factor.

It is a small thing but if the viewport scale is not set properly the text won't show so it is a way to ensure the viewport is set to the right height.

As for seeing all the various scales when picking anno text simply set SELECTIONANNODISPLAY to 0.

[CyberAngel]

it is easier for the user to type 0.10 for a text height instead of the height times the scale factor.

Well, that's the theory. In practice I can never get it to work the same way twice. I'll rotate the text at scale A, and it won't rotate at scale B. Then I'll rotate it at scale B, and it does rotate at scale A. Ditto for moving. I close the drawing with the scale at one setting, and when I open it again, the scale has changed. It's enough to make you take up beekeeping.