Dimension styles - AutoCAD Tutorial

- [Instructor] Dimension styles are one of the most complex styles that we can create within AutoCAD. They have multiple variables. Let's just look at some of the commonly adjusted parameters within the dimension style, and in the process set up our dimension style for our template. And so I'm in the Annotate ribbon, the Dimensions panel. I'm going to choose the bottom right arrow to open up the Dimension Style Manager. We're going to create a new dimension style and named it Linda.com, and I'm going to provide some more information in the name such as that this is for architectural use, the A, and that it's going to be an Annotative style which I'll check that box for. When we click Continue, it opens up the Modify panel and allows us to make some adjustments. All the adjustments when it comes to measurements are paper measurements. In other words, when we print this, what length do we want beyond the dimension lines? What offset from origin when we print and we measure it? And so don't try to do the measurements in your head assuming we're working with model space. We're going to let the software make those adjustments for us. And the preview helps us as well. So instead of extending beyond the dimension lines, .18, we'll just say 1/8 of an inch which brings them down a little bit and you can see the preview adjusted. We go to our Symbols and Arrows, and we're going to change this from Arrowheads to Architectural ticks. Again we see the preview adjust. A standard best practice is to have our arrowhead size the same height as our text. So whatever our text is going to be, this is what our arrowhead size will be. We'll set that there, and some other adjustments that have to do with marking any radial or diameter dimensions. Our Text we're going to have and set to our Text style. Now notice there are three text styles now, Lynda Annotative, Lynda Bold, and Lynda.com Standard. So I've created another style here, and if we come to Lynda Standard, we can actually uncheck Lynda Standard and set the Height to zero. The reason we do this is it gives us the control then to make the adjustment to our text height within our dimension style, our table styles, and the like. And so ultimately most of the time we're going to have at least three styles, one that's kind of used as background style setting the font for dimensions, tables, and the like, one that we're going to use for production, and one for any bold text that we may run into. Finally let's walk through and notice the text alignment here is horizontal, and we're going to say we want it aligned with the dimension line, and we want the text to sit Above the dimension line. How far? Well we can change that right there. We've already said that the text is going to be Annotative, so it will automatically become the size based upon our scale here. And then for our Units, we said that our dimension style is A, therefore it's Architectural, and then our Precision we can adjust to 1/4". Finally with our Angular and Linear units, we can control whether or not it has the extra zero. So you notice with our angular unit here, 60 degrees, it has 60.00. We don't need those trailing zeros, so I'm going to say suppress them. And notice that's already suppressed for our linear units as well. So it'll only say one foot, three inches if there's three inches. Otherwise it'll just say one foot. And a lot of these are pretty much our standard adjustments you're going to make for your different dimension styles. I'm going to go ahead and click OK. Make sure that's set as our Current, and then you can Dimension your drawing. Now as you do this, notice now that the arrowheads line up nicely because of the tick marks, and we can make some adjustments to the location of the text after the fact. One thing though that you might see is if we place Angular unit here, it uses the tick marks when really it would probably look better with arrowheads. And if we placed a radial label here, it does the same. What if we just wanted to override some of the settings that we set just for these two different types of dimensions? That is where child dimensions come into play, child dimension styles. So we have our Linda-A-Annotative set here, I click New and I'm going to say I just want to use or create a child dimension just for radial dimensions. We click Continue. We're going to change our Symbol to Close filled. The Text location being Horizontal and Centered. You see the preview there. We click OK, click Close, and now notice how it looks much prettier. And so it still works with any other settings that we have for the parent. So if we changed the units, if we changed the precision of the units of the parent, this would change. We've only overridden the location of the text and the arrowhead. That's the power of child styles within our dimension styles as well. And so there's a lot of variables. Take the time, use the preview, and as you note here, in our template we even have some practice exercises that allow us to see and get the right feel for dimensions. We get them just right, save them in our template, and our users never have to worry about what style to use.