AutoCAD 2005: One Step at a Time, Part II
This step-by-step text meets the updated requirements of AutoCAD 2005 and will help you get acquainted with guidelines and splines, MText, dimensions, tables and fields, multilines, and much more.
TABLE OF CONTENTS AutoCAD 2005: One Step at a Time, Part II
Lesson 15: Customizing Dimensions
Every design industry has its own preferences about such things as units, dimension arrows, text sizes, tolerances, and so forth. If all industries had to accept decimal dimensions (with four decimal places), AutoCAD would probably lose its business fairly quickly especially from architectural and petrochemical designers who rely on the ever-present feet and inches of architectural drafting. Indeed, even metric users might wash their hands of taking millimeters to four decimal places. In this lesson, we'll look at changing the way AutoCAD creates dimensions to fit different industrial standards.
15.1 Creating Dimension Styles: The DDim Command
| Note | We'll use dialog boxes for our customization. AutoCAD will store each of our settings in a DIMension VARiable ( Dimvar). You can adjust each dimvar manually at the command prompt (as we did in earlier releases). But take my word for it, only a programmer would want to customize dimensions this way! Still, for those who are into that sort of thing, I've included a list of AutoCAD's dimvars with their default settings in Appendix E. |
Each drawing can incorporate several dimension styles, but there's rarely need for more than one. AutoCAD's clever use of the Family method of setup enables you to create overall dimension settings ( Parent settings) for the drawing with different settings for each of its six children: Linear, Radial, Diameter, Ordinal, Angular, and Leader. This is a remarkable accomplishment when compared with...
Copyright Forager Publications 2004 under license agreement with Books24x7
