Expert: Bill DeShawn - 2/14/2008

Question
I am a long-time user and this is the first time this issue has surfaced. Created multiple viewports and when we toggle between them, all vports revert to a common zoom factor. The only thing to do is immediately lock each one. I am scratching my head. I suspect a system variable that somehow controls all zoom factors to be affected at once. Thank you.

Answer
Whenever something like this happens to me, I like to eliminate the obvious first.  Audit and save the drawing, exit AutoCAD and restart AutoCAD.  Then try again.  Sometimes that's all it takes to get something going right.  I've looked high and low for a variable that can control global scaling of all the viewports.  The only way I know to do that is with the Properties Palette.  With PICKFIRST set to 1, select all the viewports, make sure they are unlocked, and then type in a scale factor.  Apart from that I don't think there is a way that AutoCAD is supposed to globally change your viewport scale.  Nothing wrong with locking the viewports.  I do it all the time.  I don't want the scale factor to change and it's always a prudent thing to do, especially since you want to plot to scale and there is still a VPMAX command and VPMIN command, and a Model Tab, so you've got nothing but a huge variety of ways to access model space.  You don't need to have Viewports unlocked.

Still, I'll check to see if anybody else has experienced this.

Please, when you write, include the version of AutoCAD you are using.

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Bill DeShawn
http://my.sterling.net