Читать книгу AutoCAD For Dummies - Ralph Grabowski - Страница 53

Even if you’ve engraved the drawing scale factor on your desk and written it on your hand — not vice versa — AutoCAD doesn’t know the drawing scale until you enter it. Keeping AutoCAD in the dark is fine as long as you’re just drawing continuous lines and curves representing real-world geometry because you draw these objects at their real-world size, without worrying about plot scale.

However, as soon as you start using text, dimensions, and noncontinuous dash-dot linetypes (line patterns that contain gaps in them), you need to tell AutoCAD how to scale the gaps in the linetypes based on the plot scale. If you forget this, the dash-dot linetype patterns can look waaaay too big or too small. Figure 4-5 shows what I mean.

FIGURE 4-5: And this little center line looks juuuust right!

The process of setting the three relevant scale factors was messy in earlier releases but is now trivial. The Annotation Scale button near the right-hand end of the status bar displays the current drawing scale, which by default is 1:1/100%. Click it to display a list of 25 standard drawing scales.

You can always change the current drawing scale later if the need arises.

At some point in your career, you may encounter a drawing that was created in an earlier release. In the appropriate chapters, I explain how to deal with scale factors in these older drawings.