Creating and Managing Dimension Styles in AutoCAD

We're working on creating our template file. We have just used the design center drawing and we have imported the text styles from that sample drawing into this. What we're going to work with next are dimension styles.

If I go up to annotate and if I do a linear dimension and go from here to here and place it here, you can see what the standard dimension style looks like in AutoCAD. If I were going to the dimension style manager, you can understand that we have the standard dimension style. I can modify it and this has all of the components that are already built in.

Now, this is a graphic user interface and this is where we control things like how far an extension line extends beyond the dimension line, what the offset is from the origin, that's that small distance here. What I'm using for my arrowheads, what font I'm using, my fit factor, which is normally 48 for our architectural drawings, what my primary units are, their decimal, alternate units if I want to have soft metrics, and any tolerancing values. So this user interface is a graphic presentation of system variables that work in the background to control what dimensions look like.

I'm just going to be at the command prompt. I'm going to type set var for set variables and do a question mark. And I'm going to say dim star.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to be presenting a list of all of the dimensioning system variables. So you can see that the dimensions are actually being driven by these system variables that are on the screen. So there's lots and lots and lots of them.

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Many, many system variables. And I'm just hitting enter and it's collapsing based on how the new command prompt is working. So again, I have dimensions.

I have system variables that control what the dimensions look like. Now, in years gone by, people would have to know the exact system variable and set that system variable so that they could create a dimension style. Those system variables, again, are what you will see behind the scenes for the dimension style manager.

Creating your own dimensions from scratch is a whole lot of work. So just like importing text styles, importing dimension styles from other drawings is also a good idea. And it's going to be a lot easier.

So I'm going to go to the insert tab, go back to the design center, and within the design center drawing, I have some dimension styles. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to select leader 48 and tick tick 48 and drag those into the drawing. I'll close this.

I will now erase out this dimension. I'll go back to annotate. I'll go to the dimension style manager.

And I'm going to take tick tick 48 and make it my current dimension style. I'm going to do a right button and delete the standard. So what I'm now doing is I'm creating my template file.

And I have two dimension styles that are already in there. One that's tick tick 48, another that is leader 48. And again, you can see how things look.

So tick tick 48, set it as my current. If I'd like, I can go into modify. And this is simply talking about dimension styles.

Here's one thing that happens. Normally when we work, we give a layer a color and that is the bi-layer color. In some offices, people prefer to have the dimension line to be a different line weight than the extension line.

So what they would do, for example, is somebody could say, if I want to have my dimension line heavier, and if color yellow is a heavier pen weight, I will make it so that the dimension style will always be using the heavier pen weight for the dimension lines. Similarly, if, for example, green were a lighter pen weight, that the extension lines would now be using the green color assigned pen. So this way you could be on your layer, but it's essentially forcing colors, which means it's forcing line weights, depending upon how you've assigned things within your color table file.

So this way, if the boss person says that they want us to have our dimensions with a heavier pen used for dimension lines, a lighter pen for extension lines, here in the dimension style settings, we would go on and force the colors independently for the dimension line and for the extension line. It is more common to just use the bi-layer characteristics, which is what I'm going to be assigning back, but I just wanted you to understand those variables. Now this is the dimension line, this is the paragraph, essentially about dimension lines.

You can see that it's saying, how far do I want to extend my dimension lines beyond the ticks, so the area right in through here would be the extension. I can look at how far the extension lines go above the dimension line, and again the offset spacing from the object being dimensioned. What we're using here are the standard architectural ticks that come with AutoCAD, so there's a large list.

I'm saying to use the style text 01. This is the height that's being used at a scale factor of 1. Where do I want the text placed? You can see here it's above the dimension line. Do I have it outside? Is it below? Again, different countries present their dimension lines differently, but this is the way that we tend to do it in North America.

The fit factor is the scale factor. You can see right here it says 96. I'm going to change it to 48 because I'm working with a file that has a dimension style called TickTick48, so I want to make sure that my overall scale factor is 48.

Primary units are architectural. Alternate units, if I want to display soft metrics, I can click it here. What I've done is I've said display alternate units.

The alternate units are using a decimal format. I'm saying have two levels of precision, the conversion factor 2.54, and then I have a space CM that's going to be saying centimeters into there. I'm going to turn it off, and if you want to use tolerancing, you can do that.

The big thing that we've done is that we went into the TickTick. We know that we want to have ours called TickTick48 because we're using a tick on either side of the extension lines.

We have a scale factor of 48, and it's just turned out that the sample that we brought in had it named TickTick48, but it had a fit factor of 96, so we adjusted the fit factor to be 48.

Again, when you create your dimension styles, everything for the dimension styles is created as if it were a one-to-one, and then you have the multiplier, which is essentially our plot scale factor, so you have a multiplier that would be taking those one-to-one variables and multiplying them by a factor of 48. If I wanted to create a new, you can see I have TickTick48 highlighted. I'm going to say new.

It's going to say start with TickTick48. I'm now putting the name in. I'm going to delete out where it says copy of.

I'm going to press the end button, backspace twice, and go 96, and I'm going to go continue, and so the big difference between TickTick48 and TickTick96 will be a scale factor of 96, so I'm going to make this scale factor 96. I go OK. I'm still going to make 48 my current, and I'm going to say OK, and I'm going to save the file, Control-S.

So, now if I go Control-New, Control-N for new, and if I use the VDCI template, you can see that if I go to format, if I go to textile, that I'd have the textiles 1, 2, 3 in it, and if I'm on my dimensioning, if I go to dimension style manager, you can see I have the leader 48, the TickTick48, TickTick96. In the drawing again, I've imported those into the template file. This new drawing is a copy of that template file, and up here in dimensions, you can see that it's listing the different dimension styles that are going to be there.

So, we've brought in our dimension styles, and let's get ready to do something else.