AutoCAD® 2009 & AutoCAD LT® 2009 All-in-One Desk Reference for Dummies®

Chapter 2. Dimensioning

Dimensions are a form of annotation that provides information about the size or angle of a part so you know how it should be manufactured or constructed. Typically, dimensions provide information on the length of a part, the diameter of a hole, callouts in the form of leaders, or the allowable tolerances that a machined part can have before it might fail. In this chapter, you find out how to create and work with dimensions, leaders, and geometric tolerances.

AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT offer a number of dimension-related commands to help convey your design ideas to the people who are doing the construction (in the case of a building) or manufacturing (in the case of a machine part). Just as text styles manage the appearance of text in a drawing, dimension styles do the same thing for dimensions and multileader styles for multileaders. Dimension styles allow you to visually define how dimensions appear in a drawing, but they are more complex than text styles. Multileader styles control how a multileader is created, the type of annotation object that is used for the content of the multileader, and how it visually looks in the drawing. Both dimension styles and multileader styles also use text styles to help format the way the text in the objects appear.

Understanding What a Dimension Is Made Of

Dimensions are made from lines, arcs, multiline text, single-line text, 2D solids, points, and blocks. Hands down they're one of the most complex objects in AutoCAD or AutoCAD ...