Why does nobody warn you about drawing scale in AutoCAD the wrong way?

Was doing a set of plans for a small addition last week and I realized I've been drawing everything at 1:1 in model space but scaling my text and dimensions by hand for years. My buddy who drafts for a civil firm saw my file and nearly lost it. He showed me how to set up annotative scaling properly and it saved me like 2 hours of fiddling on the next project. Has anyone else been doing this the hard way for way too long?

3 comments

3 Comments

matthewmartin24d ago

Had a buddy once who drew everything in paper space and scaled his actual geometry up and down. Took him like three years of doing it that way before someone finally yelled at him. He had this whole system where he'd draw a 1/4" = 1'-0" line as an actual 1/4" long line in model space. His files were a nightmare mess of mismatched scales and he'd just scale text manually every time. When he switched to proper annotative scaling it blew his mind how clean his drawings got. Still makes jokes about the "dark ages" of his drafting life before that.

taylorellis24d ago

That line about the "dark ages" is way too real. I read a forum post once where a guy said he went five years before learning annotative scaling even existed. He described his old method as basically a house of cards that would collapse the second anyone else tried to edit his files. Did you end up switching all your old drawings over or just start fresh from the new system?

kaih3624d ago

Oh man, I feel that one deep in my bones. I had a buddy who did the exact same thing with paper space scaling geometry up and down. His files were like a puzzle that nobody else could solve. When I finally showed him how annotative scaling worked he just stared at the screen for a full minute. Switching over all the old drawings is a pain but honestly it's worth it to avoid that house of cards feeling. I started fresh with the new system and never looked back. Life is too short to fight with dimension styles every time you open a file.