Dimension HELP

[StructCorey]

Hey guys, This is my first post.

 

So I've studied Autocad for 4 years in Highschool, and 2 years in college. I now have 2 years work experience as well. I started a new job in December as a structural designer ( I love it). Here's the thing, though. They don't want me to use paperspace. So what my problem now is HOW DO I WORK OUT MY DIMENSIONS with my scale of drawings. I'd like to be able to draw everything @ 1=1 then make a block of the drawings with dimensions on it and scale it down to say 1/4"= 1' BUT there will be more than one drawing per sheet at different scales, and the text should all be around the same size... I'm not sure how to make this happen using the DIMSTYLE and DIMSCALE commands. Can anyone break this down nice and easy for me? I've attached a Table they'd like me to use.

 

This will help me tremendously as I love this job, and only want to improve and make it a life long career. Thanks a lot for any help anyone can give me.

[ReMark]

Don't they also have custom dimension styles to go along with their nice chart?

 

Any chance you can bring them kicking and screaming into the 21st century re: paper space layouts? Maybe a demo?

[StructCorey]

I've tried. They are older and very set in their ways. I believe they just change their text height & dimscale for each drawing..?

[ReMark]

Did you ask if there are any custom dimstyles available?

[StructCorey]

there aren't

[Dana W]

I worked for a place like that. They had a dim style for each of their commonly used scales. For instance, for 1/4" = 1'-0" the dim text would have to be 48 times bigger in modelspace than it will appear on paper. They liked the text to be 1/8" high on paper so the text height in the dim style for the 1/4" = 1'-0" scale would be 6". All the dim styles were kept in a template drawing.

[ReMark]

there aren't

 

That's sad to hear. Any chance you can attach a copy of one of the drawings to your next post? You can strip out the company name/logo.

[StructCorey]

YES! 1/8th" is perfect! So in reality I need to find out what all my text heights would be, and create separate dimstyles?

[StructCorey]

That's sad to hear. Any chance you can attach a copy of one of the drawings to your next post? You can strip out the company name/logo.

 

I'll take a look and post one when I get a chance.

[ReMark]

You might try your hand at creating a custom dimstyle for one of the more populat scales like 1/4 or /18 for starters. Maybe even set up a couple of text styles (preset height-wise) to match.

[StructCorey]

Thanks a lot for the suggestions. I'll probably set some dimstyles for each scale, and then change the DIMSCALE according to that chart. Can't wait for all the quirks to be worked out. It's so frustrating when you need to constantly change a million little things to make it work properly.

[ReMark]

Are they opposed to using paper space layouts and viewports because they don't want to deal with annotative scaling things like text and dimensions?

[rkent]

Draw the details 1:1 in individual files, then xref and scale them into a plot file.

[StructCorey]

Are they opposed to using paper space layouts and viewports because they don't want to deal with annotative scaling things like text and dimensions?

 

Most of them are near retirement, so I guess it seems silly to change things on them at this stage of the game.

[ReMark]

So let them do it their way and you do it the correct way. Why should they object?