Annotative and INSUNITS

[NWihnan]

I often work with in meters, millimeters, and inches and it would be wonderful to have a single annotative legend with which to work from. It almost seems as though this functionality is possible but disabled by AutoDesk for some reason?

From what I've gathered if I had a legend with non-annotative blocks and have my -DWGUNITS and INSUNITS set correctly the blocks will autoscale as required. Its a little finicky to get working but I've been able to do it. However, if the blocks are annotative (as I want them to be) they ignore INSUNITS as indicated in help...why?! I am having difficulty even understanding why this would be so.

How do others deal with this problem? If I only worked in mm (or any other unit) this wouldn't be a problem and honestly if this was an option available to me I would take it. I have found a tool palette solution in which I would have to set tool palette properties to scale the block by a specific value which I feel is what INSUNITS would/should do and is designed to do...

[pendean]

"... If I only worked in mm (or any other unit) this wouldn't be a problem..."

You got it right: you can't have both or all really, since in AutoCAD a 'unit' can only be one thing (mm or inch or mile or kilometer). BUT... setting your source blocks to be 'unitless' does help you bring the same blocks into mm, inch or meter files and they ought to scale correctly.

[NWihnan]

I was of the understanding that this autoscale feature does not work in conjunction with Annotative and Dynamic blocks. Am I mistaken? I want to be mistaken!

From all my searching and testing it is only possible if you are not using annotative and/or dynamic blocks which, from my perspective, defeats the purpose of this feature...

[pendean]

Settings (and content) in your file will govern: if missing, what you bring in governs and may be resized accordingly.

AutoCAD has an archaic 'units' method of calculating 'scale': it makes no distinction between mm and inches or miles or kilometers. You should not really mix-n-match if you can avoid it, IMHO your mm library should be separate from your inches library.

[NWihnan]

Honestly, I agree with you. My preference is to have all the legends seperate and have them contain all the tools I would require for the drawing units I am working in. I feel as though the extra work required to manage a legend for each unit type is outweighed by the convienence of having the correct dimstyle, tablestyle, mleaderstyle, and so on.

I am investigating this at my companies request as they would prefer that I only had to manage a single legend and I am attempting to comply.

[Anonymous]

---

@pendean wrote:
Settings (and content) in your file will govern: if missing, what you bring in governs and may be resized accordingly.

AutoCAD has an archaic 'units' method of calculating 'scale': it makes no distinction between mm and inches or miles or kilometers. You should not really mix-n-match if you can avoid it, IMHO your mm library should be separate from your inches library.

---

Why? Why should I have to make and maintain two separate block libraries? If I update a dynamic block later, then that means I would also have to update the metric or imperial equivalent block.

I would love to work in a metric only environment, unfortunately I am Canadian and find myself working for companies all around the world, including american ones. That means I end up flipping between imperial and metric constantly.