specifing a scale for my drawing

[shamrocks]

I'm not the most experienced Autocad user in the world, so please don't get discouraged with my questions. I need to specify a scale for my drawing, but not sure how the scaling works, as if you print on different size paper, the scale will be different. The drawing is in real dimensions (coordinates), so the length of lines are 66KM in reality, so how do I specify the scale?

[Bill Tillman]

There are different ways to achieve what you want. But you should really stick to doing your scaling in Paper Space inside your viewports. Sometimes rescaling an object in Model space is necessary, but I prefer to leave the Object in Model space just as I drew them, in full scale.

 

When you're in one of your layouts, simply select one of the viewports you want to work with and then open up the properties menu. Under the Misc section you will find a line item for Standard Scale. This is where you can select one of the many typical scales used in the industry. Of course you can also use the Custom Scale and set it to anything you want. Once you set the scale for this viewport, your objects will appear in the viewport to the chosen scale. Just be careful how you start moving and zooming around this viewport until you have locked it. Otherwise your scale will change based on the new view you set.

[shamrocks]

hi Bill,

Thanks for the response, however I was unable to accomplish anything in the Layout views using the Viewports. Must be doing something incorrectly. Nevertheless, I just added a scale bar at the bottom of the drawing for now, but would love to know how to get the scaling to work so instead of the scale bar I can use numberical representation such as 1:1000 or 1000:1, etc.

Kind Regards

Russ

[Bill Tillman]

Just select the viewport you want to set the scale for. Then open up the properties window and select a scale from either the Standard or Custom Scale menus.

 

This is how it appears in AutoCAD 2009. Your's may be slightly different but by setting the scale in the viewport you will achieve what you want. You can set different scales for any viewports so don't be shy about playing around with this. You will find like I did that this is one of those hurdles in using AutoCAD that once you understand it, many other tasks will become easier.

[Strix]

new thread created to avoid confusion in original of different topic