CAD ADVICE

Welcome to Jim's Advice Column

Featured Dilemma:

Architectural Drawings for a Civil Draftsman

Dear  Frusterated,

The Architectural drawings are usually set up so that one drawing unit is equal to one inch and I'm pretty sure what you are used to is have one unit equal to one foot. To get the drawing to read feet you will need to scale whole drawing by a factor of 1/12 or 0.08333333... . Do so by typing in at the command line
Command: scale
Select objects: all
Select objects: <cr>
Base point: pick anywhere you want
<Scale factor>/Reference: 'cal >> Expression 1/12
After scaling your drawing your units will be in feet. You must now change the text size and the dimensions to the proper size. To change the dimensions quick and easily just reset the dimstyle to what you like to work with and just update all the dimensions.

Good luck!

Jim

Dear Jim,

I am a civil draftsman and I am having a problem with a drawing I got from a Architect. When I open the drawing on my computer I can not get correct distance measurements. I noticed that when I set DDUNITS to Architectural units the distance command gets correct readings but, when I change it back to decimal units it reads things wacky again.. Is there an easy way I can change the drawing to be what I am used to working with?

Sincerely,
Frusterated,
in Yahoo, CA.

UPDATE
From Steve Knopf
Steve wrote:

Jim,

In your column about scaling Arch. dwgs by 1/12 you said to pick anywhere for a base point. If you pick 0,0 you can always scale it back before you give it back to the consultant, or still be able to overlay the electrical when he decides to give it to you.

Another Civil Tech.
Steve Knopf

Steve is right and this is a good idea.

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