Controlling the size of section and elevation callout "heads"

[Anonymous]

As I continue my learning of AutoCad on the PC after having been a Mac CAD (non-AutoCad) user for 15+ years, another question has cropped up.  My boss wants the circular "heads" of the elevation and sectional callouts to be smaller on the finished drawings.  How can I control (or override) the default size of these?  Or do I need to override on a case by case basis?  I've searched these and other forums and what I am getting a sense of is that AutoCad controls those sizes pretty tightly so they remain annotative and AutoCad sets them at the size it thinks they should be and changing that size is not a simple process.  Thanks in advance for any assistance!

[Anonymous]

In doing some digging, I am wondering if either of these is an option:

A) If I launch the Design Center and look under Blocks, I see blocks for "Anno_Section_A2" and "Anno_Elevation_A2".  If I double-click these, I get an "Insert" dialogue.  There is a "Scale" section - but there is only an ability to alter the X scale (which is "1").  The Y and Z options are greyed out.  Would I scale the callout heads here?

or

B) In the callouts palette if I right-click on a callout, such as "Elevation Mark A2" I see in the "Tag and arrow location" field of the dialogue that there is a pointer to the file "C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\ACA 2011\enu\Styles\Imperial\Callouts (Imperial).dwg".  If I go to this dwg file on the hard drive and open it, I see all of the callouts in model space.  Can I edit the sizes here (after first making a backup copy of this file in case I need to restore later)?

Am I on track with either of these routes?

Additionally, I pulled out hard copies of some past drawings, and the sizes were smaller on those and are what my boss is looking for.  The only change since those drawings is that the engineering department has given me their template drawing so I would have their layouts, the correct title block, the company text styles, etc (I am fairly new to this firm).  Could it be that this new template has the larger sized callout heads than the default ACAD Arch drawing template that I had been using these previous weeks?  If that is the case, then where do I edit the callout sizes assigned to that template?

Again - thanks in advance for any and all assistance.

[David_W_Koch]

From the block names you list, I assume you are using AutoCAD Architecture and that you are using the out-of-the-box content. Two things control the size of annotation content in AutoCAD Architecture: the current Drawing Scale and the Annotation Plot Size. ACA content is created such that 1 unit in the source content will be scaled so that it plots at the Annotation Plot Size when plotted at the Drawing Scale. Ordinarily, you would set the Annotation Plot Size (on the Scale tab of the Drawing Setup dialog) to be your "standard" text height, as that is the size that the text in most content will end up at. Some content has larger or smaller text (such as the Title Marks).

So it could be that the plots of the previous drawings had a smaller value set for the Annotation Plot Size, which would then reduce the size of the placed content. Someone could have also changed the scale factor of the content to affect the overall size. (The Y- and Z-scale factors are grayed out and unavailable for blocks that are defined to be uniformly scaled. If you change the X-scale factor, all three will change.)

If the Annotation Plot Size is set correctly for your firm's standards, and the content is still too big, you will want to redefine the blocks (or create entirely new, custom content) to reduce the graphic size. In the long run, that will be better than having to manually scale the blocks after placing them, and, depending upon the nature of the change, may allow you to maintain the text size while making the other graphics smaller.