Drawing units: Architectural vs Decimal...when and why?

[jaikin01]

my office is currently revamping our office standards. we have architects and landscape architects. we are trying to understand a little more about the benefits of using architectural drawing units and decimal drawing units for SITE files only. some defer to architectural while others stick with decimal and swear by it...its an ongoing battle.

 

any idea why either should or should not be used?

 

also, what is the benefit of using 'unitless' rather than feet or inches in the insertion scale?

 

any help?

[ReMark]

Why not use both via Alternate Units in your DimStyle?

[jaikin01]

not familiar...how does that work?

[Tankman]

Welcome to the forums jaikin01!

 

Where might you be posting from? Just curious.

 

For architectural drawings, I would defer to architectural units; 1'-6 1/4".

 

Machine parts, all kinds, decimal units. 18.25".

 

Just my thought, and preference.

Let's see what the forum members rate the choices.

 

Almost sounds like a poll!

[ReMark]

not familiar...how does that work?

 

DimStyle > Modify > Alternate Units tab. Make your second choice here after setting the Primary Units. Both should then display with the alternate enclosed in brackets.

[dbroada]

I consider unitless to be a leftover from early versions.

 

We drew exclusively in mm so it didn't matter to us what units they were, 1 unit was ALWAYS 1mm so we only ever used unitless. However AutoCAD will now automatically scale an imperial block when being inserted into a metric drawing and visa-versa. Obviously this only works if it knows what the units of the block are and will guess if the block is unitless. As its guess is not always too good I now define my blocks as mm blocks. I would recommend defining a system rather than using unitless these days.