From the course: AutoCAD: Annotation Scaling in Drawings

What is annotation scaling in AutoCAD? - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD: Annotation Scaling in Drawings

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What is annotation scaling in AutoCAD?

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- [Instructor] So we're in the next chapter now of the Annotation Scaling in AutoCAD drawings course. And what we're going to look at is an introduction to annotation scaling. Now what I'm going to do is use a new drawing. You can see the drawing name at the top of the screen there. It's 01_IntroductionAnnotation.dwg. I'm going to utilize AutoCAD dimensions in this particular drawing to show you how annotation scaling works. Now, when we work with annotative scaling, if you look down at the bottom of the screen on the status bar, can you see that blue symbol there? That's telling me that the annotation objects are on and you show them always. Now, you may recognize the drawing from the introductory videos. It looks remarkably similar but for one thing. We have an extra dimension here. Now when I hover over that dimension, you can see there's that little symbol, that funny little triangular type symbol. Now that tells me that that particular dimension is what they call annotative and it uses annotation scaling. So what is annotation scaling? Well, the quickest and easiest way to show you this is this particular dimension is set with an annotation scale down here on the status bar of one to four. So if I now go to my layout tab here, you'll see here that that dimension appears quite happily in the left-hand view port. Now if I click on the edge of that view port and look at the status bar, the view port is also one to four. That's what annotation scaling is all about. If you set the annotation scale in the model to one to four, and then you set the view port scale to one to four, the dimensions appear using that annotation scale of one to four. If I just deselect that view port, you'll notice in the right-hand view port that the dimension does not appear. If I click on that view port, you can see it's using a scale of one to five. Now what that means is, is that particular dimension does not have that annotation scale of one to five applied to it, so it won't appear in the right-hand one to five view port. And that's basically what annotation scaling is all about. So I'm going to jump back into the model tab now, and if I hover over this one here, again you can see that one is annotative because of the little symbol. This particular dimension here, though, doesn't have that symbol, so it is not annotative. Therefore, it will just appear in every view port at the wrong scale. Let me show you what I mean. I'll go back to the layout tab again, like so, and can you see, look, the dimensions if I zoom in a little bit, are different sizes. The text is a different size, the arrowheads are a different size, and they're scaling per the view port. Now we want that to be consistent so that all of our dimensions and annotation are consistent across view ports of different scales, and that's what annotation scaling is all about. Getting that consistency when you annotate on your AutoCAD drawings.

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