Discover the art and science of accurately dimensioning architectural or engineering drawings. Understand the components, placement, and purpose of dimensions and their corresponding indicators, be it a tick, slash, or arrowhead.
Key Insights
- Dimensioning involves indicating the distance between two points on an object in a drawing. The dimension is usually represented by a line extending from one point to another, with a gap between the object and the extension line.
- Different indicators such as architectural ticks, slashes, or arrowheads are used at the point where the dimension and extension lines intersect. The choice of indicator can suggest whether the drawing is by an architect or an engineer.
- The dimension text, indicating the distance, is placed above the dimension line and is rotated counterclockwise for easy reading on a floor plan.
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Let's spend a few minutes talking about dimensions, and we will use this example up here as our first discussion topic. You can see that when we dimension, we always dimension to an object. And what we're seeing is that it's three feet from the end over here to the end over here.
Now let's look at the actual components of the dimension. Again, I dimension to an object. I have an extension line that has a bit of a gap between the object and the extension line, which is this entity right here.
So it's going from the end of this object, a bit of a gap. The extension line goes up and extends beyond the dimension line. So here's the dimension line.
There's an extension line here and another extension line here. Where the extension line and the dimension line come together, there is usually an indicator, which in this case is an architectural tick or a slash. If we look down here, we can see that they've chosen to use an arrow instead.
So again, with the dimensions, we dimension to an object. We have where we're dimensioning from. We have an extension line, another extension line.
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There's the dimension line. There's the indicator, a slash, a tick, or an arrow. And here is the dimension text, which is saying three feet dash zero inches.
So this would probably be an architect's drawing, because I'm seeing an architectural tick here. So you can see I have a tick and I have the text above the dimension line. Down here, this is probably from an engineer's drawing, because instead of using the tick, they're using the arrowhead.
And the text is located midway between the arrow lines. So these are both horizontal dimensions. If we look at this example, this is a vertical dimension.
Essentially, the dimension elements are the same. We have the object, extension lines, and a dimension line. This is an architectural dimension, so we still have our ticks or slashes.
The dimension text is still above the dimension line, but rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise. If you look at the floor plan, you will notice that the dimension text is always rotated counterclockwise, so that when you tilt your head to the left, you can read the text. This is the same if the dimension is pulled from an object to the left, like here, or from the right, like here.
