In the previous Tuesday Tips, I talked about some of the more important settings to pay attention to when creating your dimension styles. In today’s post, I’ll be talking about various methods of editing existing dimensions and how to change dimensions in AutoCAD.
OK, let’s set the scene. You defined the location of the dimension incorrectly, or you need to alter its appearance or placement. By far, the easiest thing to do is to use the dimension object’s editing grips.
In the animation below, you’ll see how easy it is to select the dimension, make one of the definition points hot and place it into a new position.
After that, I hover over a dimension line grip. You’ll see a small popup menu display where you can use the dimension as the start for a continue or baseline dimension, or you can even flip the arrow! In this case, I use the grip to pull the dimension up into the room above.
Finally, hovering on the grip of the text string, will again display a popup menu with various options. Here, I choose Move with Leader to re-locate the text and draw a leader. If I had just wanted to move the text string, I would use the grip much like the prior two edits.
None of that is very hard, and it’s a very efficient way to make geometric edits to your dimensions.
Text Overrides With Special Characters
Back to Dim Style settings for a moment. A style definition will let you put the dimension text above the dimension line, or below, but not both. How can you overcome this? The answer lies in the Text Override property of the dimension object.
Below, you see a typical example of doing this. I’ve got a number of these 5’-4” dimensions and I want to add TYP below the line.
Select the dimension object, and from the Properties palette, scroll down to the Text panel. At the bottom, you’ll first see the measurement in gray, so you can’t edit it (more on that in a minute). Below that is Text override. This is the field that you’ll want to edit
There are two parts to the special characters you’re going to use. AutoCAD will interpret <> as the dimensioned measurement, the \X as a line break, and TYP as the text to place under the dimension line. By the way, the X here must be capitalized.
Please Don’t Do the Following
I just said that the Measurement property is grayed out and can’t be changed via the Properties palette. That’s great. But it can still be done. And, it’s as easy as double clicking on the text string, and typing in whatever you want.
Below, I’ve done just that. The 5’-4” measurement has changed, but instead of editing the geometry and/or making sure the definition points are accurately place, the lazy drafter just edits the text and moves on.
Here’s the worst part. You won’t know they’ve done it. It looks right, so you just assume that it is. I actually worked with a person who did this. Don’t be that person.
Trust But Verify
There’s an old Russian proverb that says, “Trust but verify.” To fix overridden dimension strings, type DIMREASSOC in either the Dynamic Input Box or the Command Line. You’ll be prompted to select objects. At this point, select an area, or just type in ALL since the command filters out anything that’s not a dimension. In other words, don’t take extra time to carefully select only dimensions – DIMREASSOC doesn’t care.
Note: There is also a command called DIMREASSOCIATE – fully spelled out. It does something entirely different, so please be aware.
If there are any dimensions that have overridden text, they will be immediately highlighted for you, as shown below. Here, I find that four of the 3’ dimensions are wrong.
Now comes the easy part. Just hit Enter to end object selection, and Boom! All the overridden dimensions now read accurately.
There you go, dear readers. Dimension settings and editing in two parts. Next time, I’ll be presenting some of the more important things you need to pay attention to with your CAD standards, and maybe even some ways to manage them.
More Tuesday Tips
Check out our whole Tuesday Tips series for ideas on how to make AutoCAD work for you.
