Chapter 9: Using Dimensions

Chapter 9: Using Dimensions

Overview

Before you determine the dimensions of a project, your design is in flux and many questions may be unanswered. Once you begin dimensioning, you will begin to see if things fit or work together. Dimensioning can be crucial to how well a design works and how quickly it develops. The dimensions answer questions about code conformance if you are an architect; they answer questions about tolerances, fit, and interference if you are involved in mechanical applications. Once you and your design team have reached a design on a schematic level, communicating even tentative dimensions to others on the team can accelerate design development. Dimensions represent a point from which you can further develop your ideas.

With AutoCAD, you can easily add tentative or final dimensions to any drawing. AutoCAD gives you an accurate dimension without your having to take measurements. You simply pick the two points to be dimensioned and the dimension line location, and AutoCAD does the rest. AutoCAD's associative dimensioning capability automatically updates dimensions whenever the size or shape of the dimensioned object is changed. These dimensioning features can save you valuable time and reduce the number of dimensional errors in your drawings.

AutoCAD's dimensioning feature has many settings. Though they give you an enormous amount of flexibility in formatting your dimensions, all these settings can be somewhat intimidating to the new user. This chapter will ease you into dimensioning by first showing you how to create a dimension style .

Understanding...

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Chapter 9: Using Dimensions

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