Ordinate Dimensions can only show in vertical. rotate option is available but does nothing?

[Dennis.Meehan]

Using an Ordinate dimension style to locate objects and sometimes the text placement would be better in the horizontal than aligned with the vertical line. Too bad you can't have it unless you waste your office Cadmin time coding something with fields to display something that should be the most basic stuff CAD can do. Just needed one dimension to be rotated and wasted over an hour when I could have just exploded or burst or even called out "go look at this table of dimensions I couldn't get to display properly" then typed out the dimension manually like the first CAD users who used this program like a digital pencil. That's old skool and not cool!

[RobDraw]

The complaint department is down the hall and to the left. It's called Product Feedback.

[Kent1Cooper · Accepted solution]

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@Dennis.Meehan wrote:

Using an Ordinate dimension .... sometimes the text placement would be better in the horizontal than aligned with the vertical line. Too bad you can't have it ...

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You can have that.  Better to ask whether someone knows of a way to do something than to complain that there is no way to do it, and be wrong.

On the left are two Ordinate Dimensions as AutoCAD makes them [one dimensioning in the X direction and one in the Y]:

On the right, I just changed the Text Rotations in the Properties palette, to the other orientation.  The only tricky part is that 0° rotation means "aligned with the direction of the dimension line."  So for the 11.25 one, on the left it's already set to 0°, and you can't get it to drawing-0° by setting it to 0° there.  Instead, I set it to 0.001° to get the one on the right.  [For the 2.89° one, I just set it to 90°.]

I would worry that turning that 11.25 could be misleading to someone reading the drawing -- that may be why, even in a Dimension Style that has the text set to be horizontal, it does orient the text that way in Linear/Rotated/Aligned Dimensions, but it doesn't do that with Ordinate Dimensions.

If I have misunderstood what you're talking about, post an image or small sample drawing clearly pointing out what you get and what you want instead.

[Dennis.Meehan]

apologies for the ranting, twas working late and about to commit the crime of exploding (but leaving a copy on a noplot layer if it changed in the future)....Thank you kindly for the .1 rotation as that is what I was trying to do. I'm still not clear why it works...I even tried making a different style where the text was not aligned to the dimension line and I still could not get it to turn over and play along. I was confident a dedicated user here in the forums would deliver me the goods. Is this explained in the help?

[Kent1Cooper]

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@Dennis.Meehan wrote:

.... Is this explained in the help?

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I was surprised to not be able to find a DIM... System Variable for text rotation.  But maybe you can get something from reading about the 51 and 53 DXF Code numbers in entity data, >here<.