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You are here: Home / AutoCAD / One AutoCAD dimension style, different appearances

One AutoCAD dimension style, different appearances

October 31, 2014 by Edwin Prakoso Leave a Comment

In this Article...

  • The benefits
  • Working with child dimension styles

You may need to have dimensions with slightly different appearance. Like the image below.

 

dimensions

The linear dimension use architectural tick as arrowheads and has mm as suffix. The radius dimension use closed filled arrowheads and no suffix.

But the other properties are the same.  The text, the dimension lines and all other properties are the same.

You can create another dimension style, but there is a better way to accomplish this: by creating a child dimension style.

happy computer user

The benefits

The benefits of creating a child dimension style are:

  1. Less dimension styles to manage.
  2. You don’t need to change dimension style when you create different dimension type.
  3. When you need to modify the dimension style, all changes in master style will be reflected to the child styles.

Working with child dimension styles

Open Dimension Style Manager. You can open it by typing DIMSTYLE.

dimstyle_manager

Let’s start with ISO-25 style. Click to choose it and click new button on the right side. AutoCAD will open a dialog box.

Change in “Use for:” drop-down selection to Linear Dimensions.

create_new_dimension_style

This will make a child dimension style that’s only used for linear dimension. Click continue.

Now make changes to the new style. Let’s change the arrowheads to architectural tick.

arrowheads

You can also try to add mm for suffix.

suffix

Click OK to close the modify dimension style dialog.

Now check the styles list. You have linear as child style. Check the preview.

See the arrowheads for angular and radius dimensions. They look different to the linear dimensions.

new_dimension_style

Now try to use that dimension styles for creating linear, angular and radius dimension.

That is pretty cool, isn’t it? Now you can use one dimension style but looks different on each type of dimensions!

About Edwin Prakoso

I work as a Sr. Consultant in PT Cipta Satria Informatika. I've been using AutoCAD since R14 and Revit since Revit Building 9. I occasionally write for AUGIWorld magazine and I am also active in Autodesk discussion forum. I'm a member of Autodesk Expert Elite, an appreciation for individuals who give contributions to the Autodesk community.
Connect with me on twitter or LinkedIn.

Filed Under: AutoCAD Tagged With: autocad tips, dimension, dimension styles

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