AutoCAD® 2012 FOR DUMMIES®

Doing Dimensions with Style(s)

Creating a usable dimension style that gives you the dimension look you want is the biggest challenge in using AutoCAD's dimensioning features. Each drawing contains its own dimension styles, so changes you make to a dimension style in one drawing affect only that drawing. However, after you get the dimension styles right in a drawing, you can use it as a template or starting point for later drawings.

A dimension style (or dimstyle for short) is a collection of drawing settings called dimension variables, which are a special class of the system variables that I describe in Chapter 26.

You can create dimension styles with the annotative property — the steps to creating both annotative and non-annotative dimension styles are spelled out in the following sections. Although it's possible to change individual non-annotative dimensions to annotative in the Quick Properties or the Properties palettes, it's far more efficient to assign the annotative property to a dimension style so that all dimensions created in that style will be annotative.

Borrowing existing dimension styles

If you're lucky enough to work in an office where someone has set up dimension styles that are appropriate for your industry and project, you can skip the pain and strain of creating your own dimension styles. Bear in mind, however, that since annotative objects were introduced in AutoCAD 2008, dimension styles copied from pre-AutoCAD 2008 drawings are not going to be annotative. ...