Editing dimension styles

- In the previous chapter all the dimension objects that we made we had to adjust because the precision value was too much by default. This is obviously not a very efficient approach. It's much better to make the change in the dimension style and then all of the subsequent dimension objects that you make will have the correct information. So, go up here to the Dimensions panel and open up this drop down menu, and you'll see this gallery interface where you can select Annotative or Standard. These are the default styles that come in the default drawing template. If you actually wanna adjust the dimension style you have to click down here. That opens up the manager and we can see the same information again with Annotative and Standard. Click Modify and you'll see a dialog box that's organized with tabs. We've seen all of this information before in the Properties palette but now it's organized in a more graphical way with more explanation. And here we can design our dimension style. The first change I know I want to make is a change to the precision and that's on the Primary Units tab that's located right here. Let's change that to 0.0. This preview image automatically updates when you make changes. So, it gives you a feeling for how the dimensions will look. It shows you Linear, Aligned, Angular, and Radial dimension types. Let's go over to Text. Let's try a different text alignment. Aligned with dimension line. You see, the difference is before all of the text was horizontally oriented. When it's like this the text will be rotated according to what it's referring to. Let's see how that looks. OK and close. The text objects got rotated and that looks great over here but it's a little confusing, I have to say, for the diameter and radius dimensions and this angle doesn't look so good when it's rotated either. So, let's go back in there and I'll just show you the shortcut is D, enter, for dim style. Modify, let's try the ISO standard. OK, close, so now we got a aligned dimension text to be oriented parallel to what it's referring to and that looks good, and yet we have the diameter radial and angular dimensions oriented horizontally so I think that's really the best of both worlds. Notice that when I create a new dimension, let's say I make a new aligned dimension over here, it's going to come in with the settings that are defined in the dimension style. It's aligned and it has the correct precision. Another change that we made in chapter 01 was we adjusted the extension lines extension length in this one object. That might be something that we want to cover in the dimension style itself. So, type D, enter, go back and modify, and now we just need to locate that information. It will be on the lines tab, I believe, under Extend Beyond Dim Lines. Let's change that to .1. Okay and close. So now, all of these got a little shorter. Let's make one more change. D, enter, modify, go to text. All of the text that you see in the dimension style is actually controlled by a selection of a text style here. So, right now we're using the standard text style. We can access that directly from this ellipses button that opens the style command and here we can adjust the font that's associated with it. I'm going to change this to something thinner. I'll use romans for this simple version and I'll change the width factor to .8. Apply, close, OK, close. All the text got a bit thinner because now it's using a different font. So, use dimension styles to control the appearance of all of your dimension objects.