From the course: AutoCAD: Effective Annotating

Setting up a dimensioning layer - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD: Effective Annotating

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Setting up a dimensioning layer

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- [Narrator] We're now starting another new chapter in the Annotating Effectively in Autocad Course. This time we're going to look at dimensioning accurately in your drawings. We've got a new drawing open for you, it's 04_Dimensioning.dwg and, oh my goodness it looks remarkably like the drawing we used in the previous chapter. That's because it is. And as I always stress in these courses, I use a very, very simple example to demonstrate all the theories, methodologies, and so on, that are used in Autocad. You'll notice in this particular drawing, we've already got some dimensions. There's some hatching, and there's a polyline representing the outline of the object right here. What we're going to look at first in this fist video is setting up a dimension text layer. You might think to yourselves, "He's got dimensions on that drawing already, that means there's already a dimensions layer in there." Well yes, there is. If you go to the Home tab on the ribbon, go to the Layers panel, go to Layer Properties, and you'll see that we do already have a DIMs layer. You'll notice we've got a TEXT layer that came from the previous chapter, there's the DIMs layer there. Just double click on the little sheet of paper next to it to make it current, and our DIMs layer is now the current drafting layer. I'm going to close that Layers Properties Manager now, and what I want to do is freeze the DIMS layer. I don't want to be able to see the dimensions. So if I go up to Layers again in the Layers panel, click on the little fly-out here and try and freeze that DIMs layer. If I click on that little sun symbol, This layer cannot be frozen because it is the current layer. Of course not. It's the current drafting layer. So what I'd have to there is close, go back to the Layer panel, set my TEXT layer as current again, like it was before, and then go back to the Layer pull-down, and then if I click on the sun symbol, and move away from the menu, you'll see if I hit escape a couple of times that the dimensions have been frozen off the drawing. They're still there, they've just been frozen. If I go back to the Layer panel again, click on the down arrow, and click on the snowflake, the layers come back again. That's why we have a separate dimensions layer, because dimensions tend to clutter a drawing. And I don't mean that in a bad way, but purely because once you've got a lot of dimensions in there it gets quite busy. If you want to get rid of those dimensions for a little while, just freeze them off on their own separate layer like I've just done, and then you can work on the geometry of your design, and then thaw that layer out again and the dimensions come back again. So that's why you set up this separate DIMs layer in your Autocad drawing. It allows you to dimension accurately, but also more importantly it gives you the ability to hide those dimensions when you need to. That's why you have a separate DIMs layer.

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