North arrow for viewport too small.

[Anonymous]

Every time I insert a north arrow it needs to be scaled up afterwards. Normally, scaling up by the same factor as the viewport that I select is about right. Am I doing something wrong or is this just the proceedure? 

[mathewkol]

This is normal unless your block is annotative.  You can make it scale automatically if it is.

[Anonymous]

So the North Arrow under selection tools will rotate according to the selected viewport but still draws an arrow that's too small to see? The funny part is that it's being placed within paper space. No scaling should be necessary.

[mathewkol]

These details would have been useful in your original post.  It appeared as though you were inserting in model space.

Please indicate the exact steps you are using to insert this block?

[Anonymous]

The Layout Tools tab is only available when working in paper space.

I use the North Arrow selection. It gives me a choice of severa arrows. I select one.

I get a command line instruction "Select a viewport for the north arrow:"

I select a viewport.

I get a command line instruction "Click the location for the print layout element north arrow:"

I select a location and get an arrow that's about 1/40th of what it should be.

[mathewkol]

Ok, I see.  There could be a few things going on here.

• AutoCAD is automatically scaling based on DWG units vs units specified in the block definition.  Set the following variables to 0 to avoid this or edit the block and make sure its units are the same as the DWG.

INSUNITSDEFTARGET

INSUNITSDEFSOURCE

INSUNITS

Then edit the C3D drawing settings (r click your drawing name in the settings tab) and make sure the "Scale objects..." toggle is off in the Units and Zone tab.

Those 4 settings will not allow AutoCAD to scale blocks automatically.

• The other thing is these blocks just seem to have a weird scale.  I inserted one here, all my scales are 1.0 (or unitless) and my block scales to 0.364 regardless of the viewport scale.  I'm not sure how to fix this unfortunately.

[wmaguire]

Try setting INSUNITS to 4. Seems to be the solution for me.