Now give your dimension style a name, I am naming it as “My Anno Dim” and check the annotative radio button then click on continue. A new dimension style manager window will pop up, click on the new button on right side of this window. To make annotative dimension style type DIMSTYLE on the command line and press enter. So we can assign the annotative property to dimension and text and keep its size fixed in different scales throughout the drawing.įigure 3 is again plotted at the scale of 1”=1’ but with annotative property assigned to the dimension text in which size of dimension text is equal to its size in A3 sheet (figure 1) where the scale was ¼”=1’ making it look more consistent. Obviously, we don’t need large text we want uniform text and dimension size throughout different scales of the drawing.

Now obviously with a change of scale of viewport the scale of dimension text also changed in same proportion which you can see in the drawing but do we really need large dimension text as seen in figure 2? Now here is another drawing in which only the kitchen is included at a zoomed scale of 1” = 1’ Here all dimensions, text and blocks are clearly visible with respect to the viewport. Now with this scale, the drawing looks like this on A3 paper. Let’s select a scale of ¼” = 1’ which in layman’s term can be summed up as 0.25 inches on paper equals 1 feet on actual drawing. Now in order to plot this drawing on a normal A3 size sheet of paper which is 420 X 297 mm we need to decrease the overall scale of drawing to appropriate size. Let’s assume that we have a floor plan with maximum exterior dimensions of 525 inches and 336 inches.

The annotative property took this trouble out of drawing process. This process results in an unnecessary amount of data in drawing leading to confusion and larger file size and it’s needless to say that it also causes wastage of drafting time. One had to make multiple copies of the same object for different scales and the objects were then put on different layers and for each viewport or scale of drawing only appropriate layer was turned on keeping rest of the layers off.

Prior to the induction of the annotation scale of AutoCAD, the task of plotting objects with the correct scale for different viewports was a tedious job. The annotative property was added in the AutoCAD 2008 version and it is a useful tool for keeping annotation size constant in AutoCAD.

Autodesk civil 3d 2015 annotative text