Expert: Bill DeShawn - 9/26/2008

Question
Hey there!  I am having trouble with the scale function.  I draw furniture cut lists for a manufacturing company.  I try to fit the whole scheme onto one page.  In doing this I have to include a very small object on the page and then scale it up so that one can read the dimensions, and doing this obviously changes the dimensions.  It is very time consuming to have to redraw an object and then manually add the dimensions.  Is there any way to dimension an object, then scale it up to a readable size without the dimensions changing while still on the same page as other objects that are set at a 1:1 scale?

Answer
Freddy:
There is a new thing called annotative text that can be applied to dimensions that will scale their text size on text and dimension text objects displayed in a viewport in a layout.  It's something that I know I must delve into a little deeper myself to understand it better.  It's available in AutoCAD 2008 and above.

But there is still another way.
If you want to scale a view of geometry to twice or half its size, you can do so by use the XP option of the zoom command.  zoom;.5xp will scale an unlocked viewport to half the scale of paper space.  So if you plot your paper space at 1:48 and you zoomed your viewport at .5xp, the geometry in the viewport will actually be 1:96.  Set your DIMASSOC system variable to 2, and dimension from paper space.  In order for this to work, you can NEVER copy or move dimensions and update them.  You always have to create NEW dimensions with DIMASSOC set to 2.  When you do that, it automatically changes the DIMLFAC (measurement scale) setting of the dimension you create.  On rare occasion, it can change the DIMLFAC (measurement scale) settings of any new dimension you create regardsless of whether or not you are dimension an object in a viewport or in paper space, and I mean it does that seemingly without warning.  So, it's good to look twice at a new dimension in paper space to make sure it's reading what it's supposed to.  

Give that a try.  If you are still not quite getting it, let me know, and we'll talk about it further.

Keep in touch
Bill DeShawn
http://my.sterling.net/~bdeshawn